Tag: house

Two Poems by John S. Eustis

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

The Death Game

A couple of guys at work liked to play the Death Game.
The rules were simple. Whenever someone famous died—
like a musician, actor, or politician—the first person
to hear the news would dial his friend’s cell phone.
As soon as the call was answered, the caller uttered
the name of the deceased, then immediately hung up.

They didn’t keep any kind of score, it was just a way
of showing who was more in touch, or had quicker reflexes.
The news had to be delivered in real time right to the ear.
Leaving a message was not allowed, as there was no way
to determine who was first with the ghoulish news.
Nor was there any conversation beyond the person’s name.

Although the game could easily be adapted to texting,
it just wouldn’t be the same as hearing Death’s human voice.

*

The House We Almost Bought

I drive by it now and then
to remind myself how different
life would be right now if we
had gone through with it.
Tina absolutely wanted to buy
and was willing to bid above
the asking price, but I said no.

Our marriage was in trouble
and purchasing a house would not
have helped the situation. Instead,
it would have simply added the stress
of a huge debt to our already fragile
circumstance. Less than a year later
we were moving into our divorce,
and she was physically moving
to a new apartment. I stayed
in the house we rented, which I
could barely afford at the time.

If we had bought that property,
we would have inevitably had to
sell it and both look for places.
Or worse, I would have ended up
buying her a house. Probably not,
but you can never be too sure.

*

John S. Eustis is a retired librarian living in Virginia with his wife, after a long, quiet federal career. His poetry has appeared in One Art, Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, North Dakota Quarterly, Pirene’s Fountain, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slipstream, & Tar River Poetry.

Three Poems by Michelle Meyer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

We Were Just Getting to Know Each Other

And then you died.
It was September. When I saw you
in April we put on your dresses,
adorned our bare necks
with your handmade scarves
and drove, windows down,
to a concert.
Before we left
I took your picture.
You were seated
in the dining room
looking out the window,
face turned, legs crossed,
the sun, a halo
circling your body.
There was one photo that you liked
best. In it, your image was blurred,
hazy around the edges, faint
as your ghost.

*

The Way It Is

I’m running. It’s the anniversary
of my mother’s death
and I’m a few miles out when I stop
to take in the view.
Somewhere I hear a rooster crowing
and somewhere else a siren
is wailing.

My Grandma used to smoke Marlboro’s,
drink Manhattan’s and say,
That’s the way it is. A lazy answer
to her bruises, the world’s bruises,
but then again, she could only bear to live
in the moment and in those moments
she wasn’t wrong.

I run further, see a purple morning glory
blooming near a discarded styrofoam cup,
an overstory of green shimmering
above an understory of brown.
There is a visible line
where the chemicals end, where life hovers
above death.

Everything is straddling some kind of line.

Mom is dead. Grandma is dead.
The tiny, nearly translucent spider
that I squashed with the tip of my thumb
is dead.
I had no right.
I am full of shame
but that’s the way it is.

* 

The Question of Whether or Not We Should Sell Our House

One day it feels like we should
and the next day it feels like we shouldn’t.
We speak of the pros and cons,
but logic has never lived here.
This is a place of romance and charm
say all of the eager realtors
whose calls we never return.
My dark-haired ambition has gone gray.
I’ve lost control
of two out of the five flower gardens.
It’s your prairie, says a friend,
and I remember how the goldenrod bloomed
at our wedding. My anxiety wilts.
I’m the only one who can see it
turning to seed, drifting away,
replanting itself in a daydream.
The one where I am sitting by a lake,
reading a book and all the sailboats
are unmoored.

*

Michelle Meyer is the author of The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child (2024, Cornerstone Press) and The Book of She (2021), a collection of persona poems devoted to women. Recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Humana Obscura, Remington Review, Under Her Eye: A Blackspot Books Anthology, and Welter among others. She is one of those people who loves kale.

When You’ve Lived in a House for Fifty Years by Judy Kronenfeld

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

When You’ve Lived in a House for Fifty Years

it breathes with you in your sleep;
it lights your lucky way
from morning bed to kitchen
of blessings–the filled
pantry, the humming fridge
committed to keeping the berries
you love for breakfast
firm and delicious.

It lets you move freely through
its pleasant rooms, as you water your
peace lilies and philodendrons,
and after a slightly scary check-up
at the doctor’s, and some fill-in shopping,
welcomes you again for dinner
and a little non-alarming TV, watched
with your spouse from the soft settee.
It vouchsafes both of you
a quiet passage to untroubled dreams,
guarded as it is by ancestors
assembled in multiple albums
in its cabinets, pressed
against each other in phalanxes.

You want to pray to this house’s
lares and penates. You want to
beg them to never let you
leave it, never make you sort
the dust-encrusted plastic bins
entrusted with hundreds of letters
you and your husband wrote to each other
in an almost mythical past.
You want to entreat the household gods
to keep them forever reachable
and uncorrupted on their sagging shelf
in the garage of inexhaustible mysteries.

*

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of nine collections of poetry. Her six full-length books include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), Shimmer (WordTech, 2012), and Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, 2nd edition (Antrim House, 2012)—winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize. Her third chapbook, Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! was recently released by Bamboo Dart Press. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse, One (Jacar Press), ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slant, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verdad, and Your Daily Poem and four dozen of them have appeared in anthologies. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Judy has also published criticism, including King Lear and the Naked Truth (Duke, 1998), short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her memoir-in-essays, Apartness, will be published by Inlandia Books in 2025. She is Lecturer Emerita, Creative Writing Department, University of California, Riverside.

One Poem by Leigh Chadwick

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Millennial Poem or: How I Learned to Stop Drinking Starbucks and Wait Patiently for My Parents to Die so I Can Cash in on My Inheritance

I put another avocado in my safety deposit box.
I sell my plasma and save half the cookie
the nurse gives me for breakfast the next morning.
I am poor and so are you and if you’re not poor
then who did you kill. My loans have loans.
My daughter is growing up to be a history
lesson in debt. I own a house and I don’t
know why. Soon I will not own a house
and I will know exactly why. I’ve never eaten
avocado toast but I drink milk without the lactose
and it’s like forty-two cents more a gallon
than regular milk. I type stock market into
Google Maps. It takes me to a set of train tracks.
I park my car in the middle of the tracks, turn
off the engine and wait.

*

Leigh Chadwick is the author of the chapbook, Daughters of the State (Bottlecap Press, 2021), the poetry coloring book, This Is How We Learn How to Pray (ELJ Editions, 2021), and the full-length collection, Wound Channels (ELJ Edition, 2022). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Heavy Feather Review, Indianapolis Review, and Olney Magazine, among others. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.