Tag: Inheritance

How to Reconstitute Your Grandmother by Barbara Krasner

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

How to Reconstitute Your Grandmother

Set out your biggest soup pot. Preferably one you inherited.
Line the pot with photographs of your grandmother throughout her life.
Add a carton of chicken broth. A parsnip, dill, celery, and carrot.
Add the wick from a Yahrzeit candle and your father’s ripped lapel from her funeral.
Fold in stories, including the rumors, the insults she gave and received.
Sprinkle with salt for the hard times.
Only a pinch of sugar for the good times, because things could always be worse.
Bring to a boil. Cover and simmer overnight.
Skim the fat from the top and let cool. Pour into ice cube trays and freeze.
Serve up Grandma anytime.

*

Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based poet of ten collections, including the ekphrastic Poems of the Winter Palace (Bottlecap Press, 2025), The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025), Insomnia: Poems after Lee Krasner (Dancing Girl Press, 2026), and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026), and Memory Collector (Kelsay Books, 2027).

Inheritance by Laura Denny

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Inheritance

Sometimes my father
was a slapdash carnival,
mercurial, dangerous,
and still my house of mirrors.

He was the thing built up
and then torn down,
reinventing himself
time after time.

He thought I would be
the second coming.
But when I was born a girl
my mother finally realized
he needed to be hospitalized.

I kept my father’s blanket
folded in a closet
and rarely spoke of it.
Would it soothe me
to put my apocalypse
of the heart into words?

Not an ending
but an unveiling
of something that was always
waiting inside me, the thing
I was most afraid of
because it runs in the dark hollows
of my blood where I keep my secrets.
The thing that made me crumble
as it unfolded over my son.

*

Laura Denny is a retired kindergarten teacher who lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. She is a docent for Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. She loves to hike and forest bathe in the Redwoods near her home. Her poetry has appeared in Pictura Journal, Sunlight Press, Remington Review, Last Leaves Magazine, Orchards Review, Amethyst Review, and Macrame Literary Journal.

Two Poems by Jackleen Holton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

In the Recovery Room After the Biopsy

Once, a friend told me that his mother’s
hospice agency offered an early exit
option, though they didn’t call it that,
or use the phrase assisted suicide.
I was surprised, so I wrote it down,
the name they gave it, something
transition, maybe? Peaceful
departure? No, but something to do
with travel, velocity.
Not exactly pre-boarding,
but that’s the gist of it. His mom
said no, it was too expensive,
and they’d already gone
through all her money,
so they waited, though he
had started to say he’d be happy
to pick up the tab, but stopped himself
because he was already thinking
about the curtains, how he’d replace
them with something lighter,
maybe a new coat of paint.
My mother’s already gone.
She spared us the long drawn-out adieu,
tubes and sunken eyes.
So why did I need to know the name?
Had I been stroking my cancer scar
again as he spoke, thinking
about my nine-year-old who came home
from school the other day, angry
that all her friends’ parents were thirty,
not fifty like us. I wrote down the price,
too, I’m sure of it. Twenty-five hundred?
That’s not so bad for an upgrade.
How to say it? Put me on the redeye
to L.A. I’ll be there before
I open my eyes, the flight
attendant making the rounds, leaning
in to whisper we’re here, gently
touching my arm as if to wake me.

*

Al-Anon

There’s a church down the street
where I can go when I start to feel
those little pangs of judgment
about all the ways that other people
choose to lick their wounds.
For example, my childhood friend whose liver
must scream in that high-pitched way
that neglected plants do, a friend last seen
on Facebook, perched on the rim
of a birdbath-sized margarita.
Or my husband, coughing up pieces of lung,
then sticking another goddamn
cigarette in his gob
first thing every morning.
See, I’m doing it in real time.
I need another meeting.
Because there’s something
comforting about the aroma of burnt
coffee well past my caffeine curfew,
and the little wicker basket
that goes around, only asking
for a dollar, the clichés and rhymes
we read aloud, and the ones we say
to one another absent any sense of irony,
after all it’s not a poetry reading,
no pressure to be dazzling.
And then there are the stories.
People’s kids who’ve overdosed,
terrible spouses coming home blotto,
most of the stories so much sadder
than mine, that I’d feel a little better,
if there weren’t this competing need
to fit in, or one-up that sometimes
makes me feel duty-bound
to dramatize. Like the one time
I narrated my friend into the hospital
on the liver transplant list.
And usually someone brings a box
of donuts or store-bought sugar
cookies, and if there’s a few
that nobody else has eaten, I fold
them up in a napkin, tuck it
into my purse for later.
And then there’s the end of the meeting,
the circle, holding hands with strangers,
repeating the incantation, then raising
our clasped hands up to send the spell
out into the ethers, the exodus
to the dark parking lot, buzzing
with hope, and a little more
of that coveted serenity, a firefly
light in my soul as I let go and let
my headlights float me all the way home.

*

Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies The Giant Book of Poetry, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Florida Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Slipstream, The Sun and others.

Three Poems by Rachel Custer

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Farmer

Save your sorry. Your sorry won’t get me
my crops in before the frost. Your sorry
won’t fill the propane tank. Confess me up
a big old sack of free feed, while you’re at it.
What I don’t need? A man who can’t outpace
his sorries, who leads ‘em around like a pack
of fair-weather friends. Another man hog-tied
by shoulda done. I knew a man once, he plowed
through each day like sorries leaded his boots,
each foot dragging the bodies of his regrets.
His whole life was an apology. God, what
did he think? It would stop him dying? He died,
like we all do: with dry lips and not enough
to drink. Sorry is death for no reason. Sorry
is men dying everywhere except the spot
where you stand, and you laying yourself
down in the sand. Each death deserves a life.
It’s like, I don’t know. Here! It’s like a field.
The most fertile field needs a fallow year.
The man who never rests his field grows
nothing but the knowledge of should
have done. What should I have done?
My son was just learning how to run the big
plow, and if he was too young, if another year
would have kept him from its blades – what
should I have done? What will it help
to plant, again and again, that field where
my boy died, and to harvest regret from
the black soil of the past? Don’t tell me
you’re sorry, I used to tell him when he
messed up, it doesn’t fix it. Don’t tell me
you’re sorry. Just stop doing the wrong thing.

*

Fire

Halfway down a country road a house leans
as if asking for forgiveness. As if asking
to be remembered well. Remembers the time
the roof caved in after a wet snow and how
the candles made stories of the walls. Nobody
knows hunger like a cold child. Hunger eats
anything it can get, and if hunger gets nothing,
it will eat the house that holds it and make
a dessert of itself. Hunger would rather reign
than serve. I would rather ask forgiveness
than permission says a woman, and this woman
knows the truth: how once invited inside,
hunger never leaves. Hunkers in the corner
and glares. How it feeds and feeds. A house
leans like a fire waiting to happen. Says a child:
I would rather steal than ask for anything
just before asking a neighbor to borrow
an egg. A man walks to work as if asking
forgiveness, leaning like a house against
the wind. A house could be forgiven for taking
hunger’s side, for demanding so much,
for its quiet and constant need. A man
could be forgiven for striking a match.

*

Inheritance

Lucky from the start, I was. Came home
lips to nipple and swaddled in a good name.
Nothing softer in this world than a good name,
nothing warmer. Like the best cologne dabbed
behind each ear. Like the deep weave of plush
rugs, the feet of soft women dancing. Before
I was poor I was rich. Before I was rich I was
nothing. I was maybe the extra finger of Scotch
in my father’s night, was maybe the crystal
just-so of my mother’s glass. I was low light.
Before I was drunk I was a child, tucked inside
others’ drunkenness and waltzed around airy rooms.
The whitewashed tombs of my mother’s breasts.
Her Home & Garden womb. Her best-dressed,
drunk at the Christmas party smile. Her royal
flush spread of hair, brushed and gleaming. I
was the kind of lush that blooms in scant light.
She was the kind of hush that looms. I can’t fight
the sure dread that my mother will look down
on me someday, that she will bend over me
like reed grass. The light behind her. Someday
you’ll thank us, I imagine her saying, everything
we gave you. The kind of name that could never
belong to the kind of man I am. The cold comfort
of no blame. A world willing to shift to fit my name.

*

Rachel Custer is an NEA Fellow (2019) and the author of The Temple She Became (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, including Rattle, OSU: The Journal, B O D Y, The American Journal of Poetry, The Antigonish Review, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters (OJAL), among others.

Two Poems by Adam Chiles

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Inheritance

My mother found the dog rooting through
the mulch out back, nosing rotten cabbage leaves.
A blood shot eye. Need pushed deep into its nostrils.
What could she do but love the animal,
this famished stray, dirt steeled firm to its skin.
She nursed the creature back. Took to the fells
each day. Wandered the gravel paths
above the stacks and kilns, happy to be absent
from the tempers of that house. It didn’t last.
Her father kicked the animal out one night.
Snatched his supper plate and slammed it
against the wall. My mother rubs her arm
as she speaks. Eighty years on, she still feels it,
that sting, that phantom shard of porcelain.

*

Widower

Weekends, he parks his bike at the oak
and eases through the chapel turnstile.
As usual, a satchel slung over his back
filled with clippers, trowels, a bunch of
wildflowers. He walks to her plot, takes
out his tools and begins, digging out
a thin trench of soil, trimming its frame.
And what else can he do for her now
but this weekly crop and mend. His face
lost to a rampant beard. Below him,
daffodils, their ceaseless gold alarms.

*

Adam Chiles’ latest collection Bluff will be published by Measure Press this Summer. His work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2006 (Samovar) and has appeared in numerous journals including Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Connotation Press, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Magma, Permafrost, RHINO, The Threepenny Review and Thrush Poetry Review. He is professor of English and Creative Writing at Northern Virginia Community College and serves on the editorial board at Poet Lore.