Tag: John Amen

Theater of the Real by John Amen

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Theater of the Real

         for BC & JF

To shrug the draft, he leapt a university ladder,
shaking the rungs of math, piling numbers on his back.
At a karaoke bar under an overpass,
she belted the best version of “In the Pines” he’d ever heard.
He tipped his hat, tugged a red feather from the cityscape,
slamming a double vodkashine at her feet.
He scribbled poems, metronomic rhyme schemes,
serenading her at Dustbowl rest stops, the jukeshacks
along Highway 61. Fine, she said, buy me a BBQ dinner.
He ordered five ambrosia plates, dropped to a knee over espresso.
Roses burst from the walls, critics leapt from their stools,
applauding as she stammered, ok yes. She whittled
her tunes after-hours in a relative’s giftshop. He dissected
The Myerson Conjecture on a circular whiteboard.
They juggled cars & newspaper subscriptions,
insurance policies & wardrobes, gigs & tenure.
Picnics in the Louisville grass.
A photo shoot at the Taj Mahal.
Scrabble & parcheesi under the Eiffel Tower.
Days passed like W2s. Eggs for dinner? he asked.
How about Barbados in January? she replied.
In a balloon over Hollywood, she coughed her best Judy Garland,
as he yelled, bravo! bravo! She slept
eighteen hours straight. Christmas morning,
she forgot her best friend’s name. Later she left
the stove on, left her purse in a birdbath.
He found her wedding ring in the freezer.
She had no idea how it got there.
They drove for hours to a condo on the Pacific.
The sunset draped over a flowery sofa,
painting the white walls orange. He woke at 2am,
doors & windows gaping, he staggered
to the gray shore to find her
rummaging in mounds of kelp, looking
for a credit card. She couldn’t recall his touch,
if he was the one who unzipped her dress in the hotel dark,
cheering as she sang for the moon. He heard
a voice whispering in the dunes. The air brimmed
with fractals & pop choruses, that convulsion of stars.
He turned back to her, but her impression in the sand
had already been flattened by the tide. He figured it was her
out there laughing in the waves, but he couldn’t be sure.

*

John Amen was a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

ONE ART’s Most-Read Poets of 2025

  1. Kai Coggin
  2. Alison Luterman
  3. Donna Hilbert
  4. Betsy Mars
  5. John Amen
  6. Susan Vespoli
  7. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  8. Tina Em
  9. Kim Addonizio
  10. Molly Fisk
  11. Joseph Fasano
  12. Terri Kirby Erickson
  13. Robbi Nester
  14. James Crews
  15. Abby E. Murray
  16. Allison Blevins
  17. Erin Murphy
  18. john compton
  19. Dana Henry Martin
  20. Alison Hurwitz
  21. Moudi Sbeity
  22. Dick Westheimer
  23. James Feichthaler
  24. Karen Paul Holmes
  25. Naomi Shihab Nye

Note: For poets who published multiple times in ONE ART, in 2025, we are linking to the most-read curated work.

Idioms by John Amen

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Idioms

My mother loved that saying, the devil’s in the details.
As a kid, I somehow figured that if the devil’s there,
god must be there, too. That would mean, as I saw it,
that the holy & unholy are tucked into the invisible,
playing tug of war or wrestling or high-fiving in the atoms,
in the sprawling fog you find when you
twist & twist that knob on a microscope,
infinite white sea emerging.
I asked my father about it once.
I’m not sure about devils & gods, he said,
that’s more your mother’s department.
Which didn’t tell me much, other than
highlighting the difference between my parents:
my mother who read a poem each morning,
my father who once told me that mythology annoyed him.
What peninsula did they meet on,
waltzing a thin line before veering
to opposite sides of the world,
stamping in their own private tides?
I pray, but I don’t know to whom,
perhaps some cauterized sense of self, a mind removed
from memory & habit. I still dream a small room
where my parents share a kiss & drop their weapons,
my father tossing his boxcutter, my mother her paring knife.
They could both land a cut that didn’t heal easily.
I have the scars from their respective
swipes, & I’m sure my own blade is a cross
between the two: a prop you can dice
logic with, retractable steel you can deny
having used when your lover is bleeding in the sheets.
& speaking of logic, a throatful of proofs
is gathering dust in a bathtub. On the other
side of the house, tomes, magazines never read,
tapped for the yard sale. I’m culling, clearing,
fattening a dumpster that stretches in the backyard,
a black hole oozing its own sensible music.
My parents would be dismayed & proud, they’d
hover over my shoulder, each telling me what I
should keep & discard. These decades later,
I still pace a line between my mother
lost in her galloping verse & my father
muttering over a blueprint. But something,
yes, something writhes in that white streak,
that mist I dive & dive into, groping to find
the silver dollar, the hidden gem. If a god’s there,
so is a devil, & now look, the three of us
splashing like tourists in an empty pool.
Or maybe it’s just me, in the depths, the heights,
alone, thinking the universe is mine.

*

John Amen was a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.

Two Poems by John Amen

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Hide & Seek

I was the golden boy. I bolted for the woods, running through ferns, past the sycamores, hiding behind the well-shed. The birthday song faded, my parents boarded their boat, leaving for a new life across the ocean. When I emerged, I was no longer the golden boy & my friend, who was supposed to be looking for me, had given up, married, he had children, grandchildren, houses scattered across the globe. Our lawn had turned brown, the roof was heavy with moss, our driveway littered with mannequins & car parts. I watched the Uber driver as he hauled the roast into the cul de sac. I stabbed it with my Swiss army knife until it stopped howling. That red juice flowed across the pavement, neighborhood, the county. I waited for the moon to appear, but no one was working the strings, at least that day, & like a train that’s leapt its rails, the night just never arrived.

*

FMJ

It happened again by the diamond highway. A satyr wearing a Budweiser cap put a bullet through a windshield & disappeared into the sunlight. Police arrived, dogs sniffed the tarmac, detectives found a casing with an inscription that read love is salvation. The highway was barricaded, cars & trucks backed up to the Standalone Gulf. Someone said, we’re in a loop here & smiled a terrifying smile. The day of the funeral in Chicago / in Manhattan / in Omaha a million people flooded a Zoom call, chanting until the FBI wrapped a trailer in Musgrove, a kidnapped baby sobbing on the back porch. The satyr in the Budweiser cap sang “Amazing Grace” through a bullhorn, then turned himself in. At the trial, he waved his beautiful hooves, declaring he’d heard voices in the forsythia, his angels ordering him to spread the holy word. An hour later the judge lowered his gavel, a long sigh unrolled through the city. The satyr’s hind legs were chained, his horns pared to a nub. A bailiff dragged him from the courtroom, mane shimmering, teeth bared for the folks back home. Someone said that night & that night only, they could see every star in the universe.

*

John Amen is the author of five collections of poetry, including Illusion of an Overwhelm, finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award, and work from which was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, and his poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew. He founded and is managing editor of Pedestal Magazine. His new collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024.

ONE ART’s Top 25 Most-Read Poets of 2023

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

~ ONE ART’s Top 25 Most-Read Poets of 2023 ~

1. Abby E. Murray
2. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
3. Betsy Mars
4. Donna Hilbert
5. Linda Laderman
6. Alison Luterman
7. Julie Weiss
8. Robbi Nester
9. Roseanne Freed
10. Karen Paul Holmes
11. Heather Swan
12. Timothy Green
13. James Diaz
14. Jane Edna Mohler
15. John Amen
16. Barbara Crooker
17. Jim Daniels
18. Susan Vespoli
19. Sean Kelbley
20. Susan Zimmerman
21. Kip Knott
22. Jennifer Garfield
23. Margaret Dornaus
24. Paula J. Lambert
25. Gail Thomas

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of July 2023                               

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of July 2023 ~                               

  1. Alison Luterman – My Vibrato
  2. Betsy Mars – Residual
  3. Susan Zimmerman – Two Poems
  4. Donna Hilbert – Two Poems
  5. John Amen – The 80s
  6. Jennifer L Freed – Five Poems
  7. Margie Duncan – If Found, Return to Store
  8. Robert Darken – Everyone Has Better Parents
  9. Lisa Zimmerman – Two Poems
  10. William Palmer – Four Poems

ONE ART’s 2024 Best of the Net nominations

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

ONE ART’s 2024 Best of the Net nominations

Sandra Rivers-Gill – D’Anjou
Carol Boston – Great Lady Descending
Brett Warren – Origami of Shock
Sara Backer – After Fourteen Years
Tom Gengler – The Clinic Squares
John Amen – The 80s

*

Congratulations to all our nominees!

*

More information about Best of the Net here.

~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of April 2023 ~

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

  1. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer – Ambition
  2. Donna Hilbert – Bad Weather
  3. Jim Daniels – Five Poems
  4. Linda Laderman – Burnt Toast
  5. Robbi Nester – The Inheritance
  6. Betsy Mars – Leveling
  7. Bella Barbera – Five More Minutes For One More Lifetime 
  8. Paula J. Lambert – Spring
  9. Carol Parris Krauss – Pretty Bottles All in a Row
  10. John Amen – The 80s

ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2023

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2023 ~

  1. John Amen
  2. Laura Foley
  3. Kaecey McCormick
  4. Carolyn Miller
  5. Karen Friedland
  6. Luke Johnson
  7. Bonnie Proudfoot
  8. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
  9. Michelle Wiegers
  10. Laura Grace Weldon & Mary Ford Neal (tie!)

The 80s By John Amen

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The 80s

At first, the beast had no name.
Then we whispered that acronym,
as if by speaking the unspeakable
we might explode in our shoes.
My friend’s sister died in her aunt’s guest room,
skin bruised, eyes like a newborn’s,
an ancient child with a shrinking memory.
New wave sparked in the eastside clubs,
a bartender named Richard dove from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Crucify them! the preacher screamed.
Lock them up! the protester said.
Millions reduced to ash, a tireless enemy
flitting from blood to blood, corpses
& corpses in that sinister game of tag.
I stuffed my backpack, descending the steepest stairs I’ve known,
so many red handprints on the banister,
bus tires pounding like a cocaine dream.
I’ll never go back, I said. By the time I reconsidered,
I looked like the glowering strangers
in those shoe-box photos, relatives whose names
were scrawled in Mom’s worn bible.
Hello Hudson, hello East River, hello Joralemon Street.
Every door I slammed I had to reopen,
scratching letters to the deceased, burning them
in cemeteries, at busy intersections. & while
that strobe of angels mostly moved on
to wherever angels finally go, a few
still linger. They track the new flood
as it swells in the dark, bracing for its arrival.

*

John Amen is the author of five collections of poetry, including Illusion of an Overwhelm, finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award, and work from which was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and Los Angeles Review, and his poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew.