IN A NUTSHELL: AN ANTHOLOGY OF MICROPOEMS

Julia Caroline Knowlton, Guest Editor

Mark Danowsky, ONE ART Editor

~ 2026 ~

~~~

Editor’s Note:

It has been a privilege to curate this anthology of very short poems. During a time of strife, these gems shine like shafts of light in dark ocean depths. In a time when our attention is constantly fragmented and broken by a constant stream of information, social media, etc., poems such as these allow for an authentic encounter with the senses and with feeling.

I wish to extend special thanks to Mark Danowsky, Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART, for his devotion to poetry.

Julia Caroline Knowlton
Guest Editor
February, 2026

~~~

heikko huotari

Among Hummingbirds

Out of the incandescent into the fluorescent, rhinestones try. The crises of identity of former flying saucer pilots and the fascinating resumes of runners up. Whether I’m in the hot or fun house or immortal isolation, I’ll cast off no causal chain.

*

Vidya Premkumar

Daily Circuit

Sunpetal orbit,
the morning loops me
through marigolds.

At its hem,
saffron and ember
unfasten the night,

starseed light
holding my gravity.

*

Hildred Crill

Agitated

Scarce on daily bread
For butter luck, a silver coin
The churn’s straight wall of wood
Fat in water turns to water in fat
The sour should part from sweetness
The weight
on the churn staff
The twist
on the downward plunge

*

Cynthia Misicka

Life Unto Death

I kneel in colored light to swallow wine
with solemn wafers, they melt
on my tongue, swallow wine—
to be saved.

I break chocolate into pieces, they melt
on my tongue—make it last.

No matter. I have been wicked
and good. I still fear

I’ll be locked out
of this chandeliered room, and the next.

*

Vikki C

[untitled]

I held on once, because you showed me
the yellow scaffold leftover-lore braiding
lumen-high bees before turning stone
broke against the pantheon’s teeth
still I—waste I—refuse the nature of ruin
contaminated by a shine worth jading.

*

Nadia Arioli

Hope is a many-legged creature

but they’re all different sizes,
all different shapes,

so unsteady’s the gait,
and often—O Emily—too late.

*

Li Ruan

Father’s Moon

his wok a blooming moon

soy-dusk
ginger flare
tofu-silk
yolks hatching suns

his heart a beaming moon

my mouth flowing Yellow River

*

John Williams

You barely touch

The things of this world, cobbled

and distant, fragile as alabaster.

Every morning the scare-owl fools me with its eternal second.

We haven’t chatted in weeks. Living here in the same house,

close together as stars.

Everyone looks out of their selfies with the same broken-openness.

Before this I never knew how much

I needed to show my face to you,

clear and open to the sun.

*

Jeffrey Skinner

The Impossible

Poetry wants to nail
aria to idea—it’s crazy,
can’t work, useless—

a shoeless man
running a marathon, a dog
who’s forgotten what

it’s barking at,
a mansion of memory
abandoned in the jungle.

*

Julia Denton

Silver

Sometimes the tone of hatred in his voice
is more than I can bear. I have no choice
to leave or not to leave. That’s just a myth.
All those who love as we do know this truth.

We move together webbed in tensile threads
that loosen, if at all, when we are dead.
We dare not do without. Our vow is with,
to wear the bond so lightly donned in youth.

*

Kingshuk Sarkar

Whole

If love could be bought
I would have bargained or got
it for free.

But it came
yellow and black
with the sunflower
it left
black and yellow
with the bumblebee.

*

Kenny Likis

April Rush

At daybreak, I rose
Red, yellow, white.
I lily all morning,
Azalea through lunch.
When the forsythia lilacs,
it’s time to tulip. Sun
Flowers! Pink hydrangea!

*

Carla Schwartz

Let me off at the next light

and I’ll walk into surgery—
no gurney for me, sorry—
just splay me with a spinal
and chop out my bad knee.

Pathology has no want of words
for what they pull from me—
a stoplight that never turns green—
eburnation.

*

Thomas Daley

How

How I walk the path.
How “How I” is still used in beginnings
of today.
How tonight you’re sleeping in your threaded moon…
how I run with violet elms of beautiful tendencies
beneath it.

*

Cynthia Misicka

Life Unto Death

I kneel in colored light to swallow wine
with solemn wafers, they melt
on my tongue, swallow wine—
to be saved.

I break chocolate into pieces, they melt
on my tongue—make it last.

No matter, this wishing. My tongue

has been wicked and good. I still fear
I’ll be locked out
of this chandeliered room, and the next.

*

Dana Holley Maloney

Wail

Facing east and huddled deep
beneath these blankets, I think
if only we were whales you
would hear me miles away.

*

Ruth Groff

5am

There must be a word for it
that quiet shift to almost-morning
when a light, blue-grey cast
appears all-at-once
in place of the ubiquitous dark
marking the edges of a first ambrosial night
with one’s new-found
or long-lost love

*

William Palmer

Zoom Face

When I joined a support group
on Zoom and spoke,

I tried not to watch my head
move up and down

like an old marionette
with a string cut.

I learned to hold handlebars
I could not see.

Often now I let go
and glide.

*

Betsy Mars

Blink

The story of the milkman,
this someone I call stranger.

Bottleneck slide, suddenly
all hell broke loose, bright
stain – all that wasted fruit.

A map of shadows,
the man in the black coat turns.

Author’s Note: This poem is composed of poetry book titles.

*

Nicole Caruso Garcia

Half-Life

Heart is an acreage shyly consigned.
Ode is an elegy still on the vine.
Flirt is a play-acted slap with a glove.
Grief is an isotope long-lived as love.

*

Jane Miller

Stillborn Child

I fell through stars

my body a comma
where my head and extremities

took shape. I grew large
as a sponge animal

in water. My fins and hair
stayed behind when I escaped

all the grudges and sorrows
you would have passed onto me,

your footnote.

*

Rebecca Maker

April’s fool after the fire

I watched my dog roll on her back in green,
green grass, the wind so strong I lost my hat
while walking. Later near a star jasmine
thicket, that awning of honeyed lemon
blossoms, windy gusts: fan paddles
turn, a ghost’s trick, dog cowering, backyard
chimes ringing a constant alarm, children
streaming capes, hair as they peel downhill—
it all makes me think of that night. Mountain
now, bald from terror, beginning of green.

*

Nathaniel Julien Brame

Fall

Here is the day, wrinkling
heavy on this season’s vine

More of us huddle in
our knots of solitude

The scrape of wings
parting and departing

Here is the brittle
bachelorhood of autumn

With its bright corridors,
and always leaves

*

Ellie Samuels

At the Burial

In a small group of mourners,
air pinpricked with mist,

she obsessed over seeds, resurrection,
the sylvan musings of Hesse.

Wind ebbed through the orchard,
dripped deep sleeplessness hints.

How to ask with only two hands
for membranes of days, pink ash.

*

David Eisenstat

In Prospect Park

Beneath the ginkgo tree, a hoard
without a dragon. Fan yourself:
the gleam is real.

*

Diane Silver

The Uneasy Feeling I’ve Forgotten Something

The kitchen faucet.
Still running?

Keys in the pocket
of my other coat?

Or myself abandoned

Like a scarf caught
on a branch & left behind

In the unholy rush
of the day.

*

Ann E. Michael

Something Like Analogy

to pick up a stone is to harbor an outlaw
to take the wrong turn is to barter for silver
to promise your love is to break a stuck window
whatever looks empty may be full of loss
didn’t you say you were tired of your labors
now you can ponder your errors at leisure
to relive the past is to drown in a puddle
take up your paintbrushes render the moment
in all of its subtleties all of its flaws

*

Theodore Heil

TESTAMENT

I grew up never knowing what it meant,
to be a child laying down with an imprint
heavy in the center of the white carpet
while my mother took turns with
the garden explaining the death of things.

*

Lee Fraser

Isobarlines

a cumulonimbus clears its throat
thunder claps, hail drumroll

leathery magnolia leaf applause
fades in the vinyl crackle of rain

percussive intro: tussock shushes,
boughs creaking in the seasons’ breath

pressure, atmospheric, prevails
over the mortals

*

Anne Eyries

She didn’t tell

anyone about the pebble
in her breast; no one guessed

her skin marbled green & brown
like earth beside cut turf

flesh dark as slate, dead
weight pressed to her chest

cankers wept in silence
quiet flowers nurse her stone.

*

Patricia Bollin

A MEASURE

The brush, mouth full of paint, and a hundred
tongues, comes to feed the parchment.

We bring what we have. Never enough.
And that, love’s burden: the weight of empty.

Knowing, if I let you go
my shoulders might ease but night

would see it differently. Enough paint
to cover the paper. Then nothing left.

*

Kelly Sievers

Poet’s Mosaic

Mosaics are a way to organize your life.
— Terry Tempest Williams

Break it up. Mine. A Piet Mondrian
Fox Trot. Make it new. An up-tempo
Django jazz kind of thing. Salal’s
pink bell tilt on a blond beach. Orange
slithered above gloam. Try it. A flint
of rose to mend loss. Throated desire
in bubbled amber. Bebop clouds dusting
glass shards.

*

Janet Harrison

Bait the Hook

with darkness.

How else tempt light?

*

Geraldine Connolly

And Still Thoughts of You Linger

         — for Mark Strand

Rare but golden as a peach
shining in the sun of a summer afternoon
or a cold sunset fading in a vast field.
Your seat at the banquet is empty
and soon mine will be too.
Your absence, like the absence of snow,
lingers. And my sorrow is a feast
in the meadow of losses.

*

Julien Strong

Late Summer, Drought

A wilting flower
is still a flower. Even now,

their bent heads promise sweetness.
Damaged love

is still love: see
how the honeybees come.

*

Karena Benke

Pistachios

He’s at his dad’s for the holiday weekend.
In another town, I sit on the kitchen floor
of a condo complex for divorced women
and open brittle shells with my teeth,
scooping out green hearts, adrift
in a sea of my own making.

*

Tiel Aisha Ansari

Conch

is the bone house where sunrise lives. It opens
like a hand, fleshy fingers in armor; it’s a
trumpet that calls night across the surf
and drives away evil spirits. Fierce
defender of coral; it devours
thorny arms that scrape reefs bare.
It is succulent flesh embedded with
chatoyant pink stones, all cased in bone.
It shines dawn, sings dusk; it eats, is eaten.
It is the shell and the creature that makes the shell.

*
Kirk Lawson

Kintsugi

Vase falls and shatters
into fragments,

pieces of
a former friendship.

What happened? I ask
Nothing. You offer.

We don’t need
kintsugi you say…

I learn to accept
Brokenness

*

Anna Boughtwood

[untitled]

let me shed all language

                             and burn

*

Julietta Bekker

Character sketch

How spring moves in one body is your
mystery. When I see you—petals in all
directions. You are the seeking trees, dew-eyed
but not new. You are their
restlessness. Your hair: swaying fronds
catching sunlight. Your thoughts are birds
whose wingbeats I can feel in any room. Be
still, I yell, from my warm nest in the ground.
Your answer is a rain of tenderness.

*

David Anson Lee

The Surgeon’s Window

Under magnification, the cataract flares:
a collapsed star behind the cornea.
The surgeon says softly, We’ll make a window.
Blue, gold, and sea-green spill through the iris.
When sight returns, the patient weeps:
the world too bright, too beautiful to bear.

*

David Lee

The Waiting Hour

Four chairs face a window rinsed by siren light.
Consent forms breathe: thin lungs of paper.
A magazine lies open to an ad for mercy.
Someone’s name vibrates in the fluorescent hum.
Outside, dusk fills its syringe and lifts it skyward.
We sign. The hour dissolves without sound.

*

Douglas MacKevitt

Souvenir

I never wore the Tubeteika anyway,
hard won though it was from a market next to the mosque in Tashkent.
It never really fit, neither physically nor spiritually,
and might be misunderstood by strangers on the street.
On my cat, though, curled up in his corner and snuggled underneath it
for the extra warmth, it looks perfect.

*

Wendy Taylor Carlisle

The Music and After

after the poreless impermanence
of a first cotillion, the crinolines
and wrist corsage, the tremble,
you can never match that part of you
that’s dust now and will go
to dirt later, the part that’s water,
forever going back to the sea.

*

Arielle Theobald

I waltz home

from salsa dancing around 2 a.m.,
dripping in ten men’s colognes.
Not one did I kiss or strip for, yet they
cloak me as I crawl into bed;
with the tease, the taste, the smell
of a harem of lust and sweat.
A personal blend of magnetized breath.
I cuddle my own skin, smile as I drift off
to dreams… a satisfaction
that can’t be shared.

*

Emma Aylor

Planning the Trip

To drive alone west from west
Texas is to empty out: find

replies not close by and lushly
green (as back home, far east)

but strung in ranges far from reach,
humble reach stumbled up in broad sky

a person can, for once, see all
the daze of—a person is, for once,

all eyes. An edge accepts me,
and I can’t touch it.

*

Melissa Studdard

Design Naïf

A daughter can balance
like a teacup the color of bone.
Don’t leave her
too close to the edge
where the dish ran away with the spoon.
Like a broken faucet she will leak
over the rims built to contain her.
She will slip like a question
from the blue throat of night.

*

Barbara Ungar

DECEMBER SONG

Silhouettes of birds flicker past
the window like poems
just out of reach like you
Leonardo loved birds dreamt of flight
all his life drew devices that wouldn’t soar
for four hundred years when he walked
through the market he bought all the birds in cages
and set them free we’re trapped in our timelines
but are you not as in your poems happily
singing on the wing

*

Grant Hackett

[untitled]

around one candle the whole of november has gathered.
a lost bird from the dark flutters against the window.
the eyes of the watchers feel like seeds from the oldest branch of night.

*

Meryl Draper

Sonar

Bat wings clipping, cutting the heat of the night
sound like just-cut wheat blades
baked and bristling under invisible forms,
like a crackling bowl of Krispies.
I am alone at the breakfast table,
trying to remember where I begin and end.
I am the sonar ping echoed out into the August moon
Passing my lives and rebounded back, alone again.

*

Vidya Premkumar

Daily Circuit

Sunpetal orbit,
the morning loops me
through marigolds.
At its hem,
saffron and ember
unfasten the night,
starseed light
holding my gravity.

*

Chrissy Stegman

Family Portrait at Dusk

The street lights flicker on
illuminating the pietà of cyprus trees
politely holding the sky
hostage. I am muddy with the syllables
of quartz and light. My father releases the syllabus of
October. And that was when I pinned the moon,
like a photograph, to the hornets nest of my childhood.

*

George Bandy

[Counted down]

Counted down
and left to tick in uncertainty,
I fail, again, to account for the least
of things:
a book unread, a baffling lack of light
and my own presence.

*

Mattias Apse

Sorrows

Sore Eros—zero rose.

*

Lisa Munson

the way

surgery is imperfect

cancer creeps by chance

cells left behind spread worry from your body to mine

*

Erin Murphy

Notes from Underground

Cicadas don’t disappear for 17 years. What you hear is
a lifetime’s labor, from rice-sized eggs sown in grooves
of bark to mites feeding on plant juice. So much tunneling
and shedding of former selves. They emerge a final
draft, fat as a man’s thumb. The Latin root for cicada
is cicada: etymology and entomology, a winged pun.
Each offers a song from his own body’s hollow drum.

*

Erin Murphy

Tides

What I love most about sunrise over the ocean
is not the sun itself but the way orange-pink light
glances off a gossamer of water before it seeps
into sand. I don’t understand tides, something about
gravity and the pull of the moon, a choreographed
mystery. So reassuring, as if the planet has only
one conjunction: and and and and and.

*

Douglas Fritock

TICONDEROGA

It’s a worn-out number two pencil,
with a broken point, a chewed-off

eraser, and a trail of bitemarks
running up and down its length,

scars from a lifetime of withstanding
the gnashing of teeth. It knows

its best days are behind it.
Break me in two, it seems to say,

and remember how the shining words
once spilled from my soft gray heart.

*

Andrea Potos

TO WRITE ONE WORD

Over and over,
not as punishment like the olden-days
child at the blackboard,
but as summons
to forge some change,
absorb the word and make it true
within you. For instance this morning
while cold rain hammered again
on the roof of my heart, I wrote
Evergreen, Evergreen, Evergreen.

~~~

~ Contributors ~

Sufi warrior poet Tiel Aisha Ansari has been featured by Measure, Windfall, and Everyman’s Library among many others. Her collections include Knocking from Inside, High-Voltage Lines, Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare’s Stable, The Day of My First Driving Lesson, and Dervish Lions. She formerly hosted Wider Window Poetry on KBOO Community Radio.

Mattias Apse writes poetry from Moh’kinstsis on Treaty 7 land (Calgary, Alberta, Canada). He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he studied literary criticism. He reads poetry for filling Station and PRISM International. His work can be found in GLYPHÖRIA (Metatron Press) and Grain.

Nadia Arioli is the editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Nominated for ten Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes across essays, poetry, and artwork, Arioli’s work can be found in Permafrost, Hunger Mountain, Rust + Moth, SWWIM, and others. Latest books of poetry and essays are with dancing girl press and Fernwood Press.

Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water, winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She lives in Nacogdoches, Texas.

George Bandy’s publications include War, Literature & the Arts (USAF), New Millennium Writings, Blue Unicorn, Broadkill Review, Sangam, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Broad River Review, Neologism Poetry Journal, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Vol. IX, Virginia. His poem ‘Return from War’ won the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Award.

Julietta Bekker (she/they) lives with their family in Portland, Oregon. Their poems have been published by Pile Press, Oyster River Pages, Querencia Press, Flat Ink Magazine, The Inflectionist Review, Gather, orangepeel, and The Yesterday Review among other journals; more pieces are forthcoming from Free Verse Revolution and Ouch! Collective.

Patricia Bollin’s poetry has appeared in print and online publications including: Clackamas Literary Review, The Fourth River, Gyroscope Review, Tulane Review, and Mezzo Cammin. Her recent poem in Passager has been nominated for a 2026 Pushcart Prize. She currently serves as Board President of Soapstone, a non-profit dedicated to promoting women’s writing.

Anna Boughtwood is a poet and zine enthusiast living in Albany, NY. She is the author of several zines, including the BREAKUP ARCHAEOLOGY series. Her poems have appeared in Heavy Feather Review and Voicemail Poems. Find her posting about zines and elaborate knitting projects on Instagram (lotsa_livres).

Nathaniel Julien Brame is a queer poet from the Great Lakes and lately the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in Main Squeeze, Ouch! Magazine, trampset, The Pierian, and Blood and Thunder. Alongside poetry, his other preoccupations include cave paintings, choral music, and jumping spiders.

Vikki C. is the author of three books, a Pushcart, BOTN, Best Spiritual Literature nominee and shortlisted in the Bridport Prize 2025. Her work appears widely in venues including The Ilanot Review, The Inflectionist, Grain Magazine, Psaltery & Lyre, Sweet Literary, ONE ART, EcoTheo, IceFloe Press, Black Bough, Cable Street, and Feral.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and six chapbooks, the winner of the 2020 Phillip H. McMath Poetry Prize and has been nominated 16 times for the Pushcart Prize. Find her work in Atlanta Review, Terrain, Rattle, About Place and a selection at: http://www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com

Geraldine Connolly has published five poetry collections including Instructions at Sunset (Terrapin Books). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, and The Georgia Review. She received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Breadloaf Writers Conference and the Cafritz Foundation. She recently moved to Alameda, California.

Hildred Crill’s poems have appeared in Field, Poetry, Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review Online, among other journals. Translations include Compass Bearing by Per Wästberg (Marick Press) and The Sons by Anton Svensson (Little, Brown and Co UK). She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Thomas Daley (22) is a poet in San Francisco.

Julia Denton grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and now lives in northern Virginia. She is a widow, the mother of two adult sons, and a retired librarian who earned her MLIS at the University of Hawaii in 1996. She recently completed her Diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford University.

Meryl Draper, formerly of New York and now based in Dordogne, France, is an advertising executive turned writer. Her articles have appeared in MediaPost, Campaign, and Huffington Post. Draper is a novice poet whose work explores themes of womanhood, motherhood, memory, and rural life, and this marks her first published poem.

David Elliot Eisenstat has contributed poems to THINK, The Pierian, and Rust & Moth among others. The Managing Poetry Editor for Variant Lit, he lives in Brooklyn. Find more of his work at https://www.davideisenstat.com/poetry/.

Anne Eyries has published poetry in various journals, including Amsterdam Quarterly, Consilience, Dust, Emerge Literary Journal, Humana Obscura, Ivo Review, and Paperboats. She lives in France.

Lee Fraser is from Aotearoa New Zealand and uses poetry for ogling life’s details, emotional archaeology, and comic relief. Her full-time occupations have included field linguist and parent. In 2024-2025 she had 50 pieces published, and has poems out/forthcoming in Cordite, Ink Sweat & Tears, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbooks and Thimble.

Doug Fritock is a writer, husband, and father of 4 living in Redondo Beach, California. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Rattle, Prime Number Magazine, and Whale Road Review among other literary journals. He is an active member of Maya C. Popa’s Conscious Writers Collective

Nicole Caruso Garcia’s OXBLOOD (Able Muse Press) won the International Book Award for narrative poetry. Her work appears in Best New Poets, Plume, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is associate poetry editor at Able Muse and served as a board member at the Poetry by the Sea conference. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

Ruth Porter Groff lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, but her heart (and soul) belong to northern Berkshire County, MA. Two of her favorite poets are William Carlos Williams and Lucille Clifton. She almost added “—after Denise Levortov” to the title of this poem.

Grant Hackett. Author of short poems. Retired indexer of books. Lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Publications include The Inflectionist Review, Right Hand Pointing, SurVision, Heliosparrow, Half Day Moon Journal, tiny wren lit. https://lostwaytothesky.blogspot.com/

J.M.R. Harrison studied poetry at the Writers’ Center in Bethesda MD and graduated from the MFA program of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. She has published in Ivo Review, Pensive Journal, and numerous anthologies among others and was featured in Fluent Magazine and The Good News Paper.

Theodore Heil is the author of Movements (Bottlecap Press 2026), excerpts of which have been featured in Hobart, ExPat Press, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.

Heikki Huotari wrote his first poem the morning after the major died in the adjacent bed. Since retiring from academia/mathematics he has published more than 500 poems in literary journals, including Pleiades, Florida Review and The Journal, and in six chapbooks and six collections. He has won one book prize (Star 82 Press) and two chapbook prizes (Gambling The Aisle and Survision Press). His Erdős number is two.

Kirk Lawson lives in Ulster County, New York, surrounded by the Shawangunk mountains. Poetry provides a creative outlet to explore and enhance meaning in living. Some publications include: Discretionary Love, Months to Years, Thorn and Bloom, Pulses, Healing Muse, Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Second Coming and Whiptail.

David Anson Lee is an eye surgeon and poet whose work explores perception, care, and the quiet intersections of science and art. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals. He lives and works in Texas.

Kenny Likis’s poems have appeared or will soon appear in Duck, Paterson Literary Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and ONE ART, and in Early Innings, an anthology from The Twin Bill. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Douglas MacKevett is a teacher and writer based near Lucerne, Switzerland. His work focuses on shortform narrative and poetry. His course “Epic Europe” investigates myth, magic and medievalism in mythopoetics. When not crafting stories, Douglas enjoys the Swiss Alps with cross-country skiing in winter and hiking in summer.

Rebecca Maker writes about nature, identity, and belonging. She is published in Poet Lore, The Southampton Review, Superlative, and Villain Era and is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Southern California.

Dana Holley Maloney is a native New Jerseyan who lives and writes in midcoast Maine. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Lips, Tar River Poetry, Pine Hills Review, Paterson Literary Review, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. She teaches English at Montclair University.

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. With age, her poetry, like her body, is trending shorter. Betsy’s poetry and photos can be found in numerous journals, anthologies, as well as in two chapbooks. A full-length book, Rue Obscure, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her third poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, ONE ART, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies and six chapbooks. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at http://www.annemichael.blog.
Jane C. Miller is the author of Canticle for Remnant Days (2024) and coauthor of Walking the Sunken Boards (2019). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals. Honors include the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest and two state fellowships in poetry. She co-edits the online poetry journal, ൪uartet. http://www.janecmiller.com.
Cynthia Misicka is an emerging poet from Roanoke, Virginia. She has a forthcoming publication in 3Elements Literary Review.

lisa j munson is co-editor of the poetry journal Fledgling Rag (IrisGPress) and assistant editor of I. Giraffe Press. Her work is forthcoming in Gettysburg First Friday Poetry 20th Anniversary Anthology and The Beltway Poetry Quarterly.

Erin Murphy’s most recent books are Human Resources and Fluent in Blue, a 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award winner. Her poems in this anthology are demi-sonnets, a 7-line form she created. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and poetry editor of The Summerset Review.

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in American Literary Review, Ecotone, JAMA, ONE ART, The Summerset Review and elsewhere. He has published two chapbooks: A String of Blue Lights and Humble. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently The Presence of One Word, and Her Joy Becomes, both from Fernwood Press. Her poems appear widely in print and online, including Braided Way, The Healing Muse, Windhover, Paterson Literary Review, Third Wednesday, The Sun, Poetry East and others. https://andreapotos.c

Vidya Premkumar is a poet, visual artist, educator, and founder of Jñāna Vistar, based in Wayanad, creating Japanese short-form poetry, essays, art, and books on gender, education,
resilience, and wonder.

Li Ruan, born and raised in Beijing, China, is a Manhattan-based educational consultant, emerging immigrant poet, and writer. Her work appears in Restless Books, Assignment Literary Magazine, Persimmon Tree, Hamilton Stone Review, New York Public Library Zine, Lowestoft Chronicle, Cool Beans Lit, Shot Glass Journal, Panorama, New York Times, etc.

Elli Samuels is a poet whose work has been anthologized and published in numerous literary journals including Maudlin House, Pif Magazine, Penn Journal of Arts and Sciences, and Tulsa Review. A cookbook author and yogi, Samuels lives in Arkansas.

Kingshuk Sarkar is a Spanish teacher and translator from Kolkata, India. His poems have appeared in ‘Palette Poetry’, ‘Litbreak Magazine’ and is forthcoming in ‘Blue Unicorn’. He also writes in Bengali. His translations have appeared in ‘Washington Square Review’, ‘Circumference’ etc. and was longlisted for Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum)

Carla Schwartz’s poems have appeared in Rattle, ONE ART, and other journals and in her collections, including Signs of Marriage. Learn more at https://carlapoet.com, or on all social media @cb99videos. Carla Schwartz received the New England Poetry Club E.E. Cummings Prize.

Kelly Sievers work has been published in a number of literary journals and in ten anthologies. Publications include: Squid; Rockvale Review; Valley Voices; Plume; Prairie Schooner; San Pedro River Review; Rattle; and Passager. On-line: PLUME; Oregon Poetic Voices Project; THE PERMANENTE JOURNAL; Permanente’s LEAFLET; and SANA, Egan School of Nursing, Fairfield University.

Diane Silver is a poet, essayist, and retired journalist whose work has appeared in Ms, The Progressive, Mocking Heart Review, The Lavender Review, and numerous anthologies. Her books include the Daily Shot of Hope meditation series. She produces the weekly newsletter and podcast Poetry & Life at dianesilver.substack.com.

Jeffrey Skinner’s selected poems, The Sun at Eye Level, won the Sexton Prize, and will appear in 2026. In 2014 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. He has published nine books of poetry. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The North American Review, Image, Fence, and Poetry Ireland.

Chrissy Stegman is from Baltimore, Maryland. Her work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Rattle, River Heron Review, Gargoyle, UCity Review, Okay Donkey, Stone Circle Review, Fictive Dream, and more. She won the 2025 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Prize for Poetry and is a MVICW Fellow. She has multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations.

Julien Strong is the author of four books, including the poetry collections The Mouth of Earth and Tour of the Breath Gallery. Their poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The Nation, and The Sun. They teach creative writing at Central Connecticut State University and live in Hamden, CT.

Melissa Studdard writes poetry, song cycles, and libretti. Her most recent book, Dear Selection Committee, includes poems featured by The New York Times, The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Best American Poetry blog, and the Poetry Society of America. You can find her at http://www.melissastuddard.com.

Arielle Theobald is a poet and storyteller exploring love, queerness, polyamory, spirituality, and self-discovery. Her work appears in Backwoods Literary Press and San Diego Poetry Annual. She studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Cal State Long Beach and plans to query her debut memoir-in-verse collection later this year for publication.

Barbara Ungar is the author of six books, most recently After Naming the Animals. Honors include the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, Gival Poetry Prize, and being named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2015 and 2019. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Bulgarian.

John Moore Williams is the author of three chapbooks of poetry. An &Now Award winner, his work has appeared in Action Yes, Shampoo, elimae, and other fine journals. He lives in San Francisco with his partner and son and works with words, day and night.