Everyone wants warm sticky pink blossoms. That sick semen smell of ornamental pear.
I would love to know what is so bad about bare black branches cutting indigo frigid shadow into diamond snow.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Julia has a PhD in French Literature (UNC-Chapel Hill) and an MFA in Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles). The author of one full-length poetry collection, three poetry chapbooks, a memoir and a children’s book, she has twice been named Georgia Author of the Year. Her work has also been recognized by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.
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.
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.
We have invited all contributors to ONE ART’s ‘In a Nutshell: An Anthology of Micropoems’ to read their poem in this celebratory gathering on the day of the anthology’s virtual release.
A carefully curated selection of poems that are 10 lines or less, transcend ordinary language through sound/symbol/image/metaphor/simile, and that hold or contain compressed poetic language as sustenance.
About The Guest Editor
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Julia has a PhD in French Literature (UNC-Chapel Hill) and an MFA in Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles). The author of one full-length poetry collection, three poetry chapbooks, a memoir and a children’s book, she has twice been named Georgia Author of the Year. Her work has also been recognized by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.
Quick as a key turn or July clouds releasing downpours, I suddenly loved you more as you admired
aloud the word maintenant – “now” – mentioning its literal meaning: holding a hand. Fifty years of French
and I had never picked that lock. Now the present folds me in its have and hold vow,
future pressed to past, palm to warm palm. Every word my own swollen cloud, shaped like a clock.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has won two separate Georgia Author of the Year awards for her poetry. Her latest volume of poetry is a children’s book. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.
Now that none will be minted anymore, what will I give you for your thoughts?
How will I know what is saved and earned, how to be wise compared to pound foolish?
Will I give two of something else, lacking cents? And what will fall from our coppery heaven?
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Julia has a PhD in French Literature (UNC-Chapel Hill) and an MFA in Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles). The author of one full-length poetry collection, three poetry chapbooks, a memoir and a children’s book, she has twice been named Georgia Author of the Year. Her work has also been recognized by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Atlanta and Paris. Julia is Guest Editor for ONE ART’s IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems.
ONE ART is pleased to announce IN A NUTSHELL: An Anthology of Micro-poems, Guest Edited by Julia Caroline Knowlton!
About The Guest Editor Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Julia has a PhD in French Literature (UNC-Chapel Hill) and an MFA in Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles). The author of one full-length poetry collection, three poetry chapbooks, a memoir and a children’s book, she has twice been named Georgia Author of the Year. Her work has also been recognized by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.
What We Are Seeking for This Anthology We are particularly interested in very short poems (aka. micro-poems), 10 lines or less, that transcend ordinary language through sound/symbol/image/metaphor/simile. Like the sustenance of nutmeat within a nutshell, we seek micro poems that hold or contain compressed poetic language as sustenance. Please note: We are not considering haiku for this anthology.
How to Submit Submissions for this anthology will be made through Subfolio. More information will appear on Subfolio as we approach the submission window. Submissions will be open from November 1 to December 15. Submissions are FREE. Donations are appreciated.
Requirements All work submitted to this anthology must be previously uncurated/unpublished, though poems shared on personal websites and social media are acceptable.
Submission Guidelines Submit 1-5 micro-poems using Subfolio. For this anthology, we are considering micro-poems that are 10 lines or less. We are not considering haiku for this anthology. Please reference the standard ONE ART submission guidelines for general best practices. Submissions for this anthology will only be accepted via Subfolio. Please do not email poems.
All the arrows go through me—sharp and gold. Joy enters
(blind, uninvited violation) as pure presence from an innate place within.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has won two separate Georgia Author of the Year awards for her poetry. Her latest volume of poetry is a children’s book. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.
The reading will be held on Sunday, August 17 at 2pm Eastern.
The official event is expected to run approximately 1-hour.
After the reading, please consider sticking around for Community Time discussion with our Featured Poets.
About Our Featured Poets:
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Among her publications are a memoir, a children’s book and three poetry chapbooks. She was twice named a Georgia Author of the Year in the poetry category. Julia offers private instruction online in addition to her full load of college teaching.
Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grantee and is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press,Heavy Feather Review, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Fall, 2025. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author who has been passionate about writing since age seven. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, explores healing through unsent letters. She is currently seeking a literary agent and publisher for Pieces of Us, along with six chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections.
She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group and creative community, and is drawn to stories that explore survival, identity, and the complexity of being human.
Her work has recently appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
Sonia Greenfield (she/they) is the author of four poetry collections: All Possible Histories (Riot in Your Throat), Helen of Troy is High AF (Harbor Editions), Letdown (White Pine Press), and Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market (Codhill Press). Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Southern Review, Willow Springs and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College, edits the Rise Up Review, and advocates for neurodiversity and the decentering of the cis/het white hegemony. More at soniagreenfield.com.
Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has won two separate Georgia Author of the Year awards for her poetry. Her latest volume of poetry is a children’s book. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.
Sunlit, I sit cradling my hardcover book with its scents
of wood and ink. I doze and do not think. A breeze sends
last year’s dry yellow magnolia leaves eddying down the driveway—
gold flashes clatter and add more light to indigo sky.
Nearby, a cardinal (unseen) weds its red purpose to deepening green.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton teaches French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, where she is the Adeline A. Loridans Professor of French. Recognition for her poetry includes an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year Award. She is the author of five books. Kelsay Books will publish her first book of children’s poetry, A to Z Poems for the Very Young, in 2024.
We pick our colors: I choose “gems.” Staring at the furnace blaze beyond white hot, beyond any word, I think of my body after my death.
I drive the thought away. It is my turn to blow air into an ash-colored blob of viscous glass. We are all middle-aged,
tired, on a cloudy afternoon. We stand in a half circle. Pushing every bit of air out of my lungs, I push the death thought away.
At the end of the steel blowpipe my fiery lump opens into secrets of ruby and emerald, sapphire and amethyst, a pure sphere blooming like a wish.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton teaches French and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Recognition for her poetry includes an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a 2018 GA Author of the Year award. She is the author of six books, including her 2023 chapbook Life of the Mind (Kelsay Books).
a survivor on film recounts one prisoner killing another
over a fistful of potato peels meant to feed the officers’ pigs
the iron table where gold fillings were extracted
from angel-light corpses
our guide showing us art made by prisoners how did they get paper and pencil I asked
our guide our teacher the angel-light art still here bearing witness
on Sundays some prisoners held small concerts singing songs remembered
cherished reciting poems
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton is the Adeline A. Loridans Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Recognition for her poetry includes an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. Kelsay Books will publish her newest chapbook, Life of the Mind, in the autumn of 2023.
Within this wet darkening cries an unseen blessing.
In every hidden bird singing dies my every word.
*
Getting Older
I am becoming a dappled thing. Silver threads my hair, dark spots dot my body like a speckled egg.
Floaters cloud my vision, meandering opaque grey in the tiny sky of my eyes. My ears ring with a song of demise.
A great poet (immortal) once praised this color palette— mottled, rose-stippled, time’s upstream beauty of change.
I can seed a pieced field with one odd word. I feed on instinct, on dream. I am spare and strange.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is the author of five books. Recognition for her poetry includes an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She is also a nominee for a 2022 Georgia Author of the Year award. KELSAY BOOKS will publish her third chapbook, LIFE OF THE MIND, in 2023. Julia teaches French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.
Paris catacombs skulls arranged in big heart shapes love even in death
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is a poet and Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Recognition for her poetry includes an American Academy of Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She is the author of four books. She is writing a new book of poems in the form of biographical sonnets.
Her preferred lipstick color was “Everything’s Rosy” by Revlon, her favorite makeup brand. Polio weakened her body at age six. At eighteen she was a passenger on a bus that collided with an electric trolley car in Mexico City: an iron handrail impaled her pelvis “the way a sword pierces a bull.” She sustained a punctured uterus and thirty broken bones. A fellow passenger was traveling to the National Theater carrying pure gold leaf; the impact of the collision scattered flecks of gold all over Frida’s devastated body. Nothing was rosy. She said, “I now live on a painful planet, transparent as ice.” Frida adorned herself with traditional dresses and regal coiffures from a matriarchal Oaxaca society. A lone vision in her own Eden, she dreamed and consumed fiery alcohol and painkillers to excess while spider monkeys and vines climbed her gold-flecked soul.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is a poet and Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Recognition for her poetry includes an American Academy of Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She is the author of four books. She is writing a new book of poems in the form of biographical sonnets.
I love you but did not invite you here. I chose to come here alone with only impressions of us, inner pictures that win out over the star-crossed real. In my mind are unseen frescoes, emotion ground fine into the plaster of thought— burnt umber, blue, ochre of rose.
I love you but did not invite you here. Why do I insist on this dizzying dream? This lonely dizzying dream— footpaths made of pink marble scents of espresso & leather the ancient ringing of bells the iron lantern of exile robed statues watching the dead the dead cut out into little stars speaking to everyone everywhere here
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton MFA PhD is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College, where she also teaches creative writing. The author of five books, she is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She regularly publishes her poems in journals such as thimble, One Art, and Rust & Moth. One of her poems will be publicly installed outdoors in 2022 as a part of the GA Poetry in the Parks project.
Paris is a paintbox of love’s dark mystery and light. Its bridges and lanterns, its wrought iron balconies and pale rose moon on the Seine—all of it communicates a feeling that transcends time but not place, like a desire for someone you have never met. No wonder artists flock here like birds instinctively finding their way home. I was lovesick for Paris even before I ever came here. Like any grand amour this city will seduce you, charm you, challenge and bewilder you. Don’t worry about wearing or saying the right thing here. You do belong. We all belong. Walk along the river, look at art, sit for a while in cafés and parks. Breathe in the scent of this city, a mixture of expensive perfume, butter, cigarette smoke and soot. Watch the sun sink pink and low, listen to creaking wooden shutters concealing lives you cannot know.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton MFA PhD is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College, where she also teaches creative writing. The author of five books, she is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She regularly publishes her poems in journals such as thimble, One Art and Rust & Moth. One of her poems will be publicly installed outdoors in 2022 as a part of the GA Poetry in the Parks project.
I leave my Ohio English, native tongue, its lockstep clip-clop like horse hooves
on a road, its one syllable words like birds on a wire or fruit pie in a pan.
I learn chiacchierare—to chit chat— admiring how the letters pirouette.
Pure music subsumes me—alba, oro, fruttivendolo, verdurivendolo.
I fade innamorata in wonder within curved waves of gold leaf words formed
like drapery in stone or scrolls of violins. Now perne in a gyre, blue turn I disappear.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is a poet and Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. The author of five books, she was named a Georgia Author of the Year in 2018. Her 2005 memoir, Body Story, was named an outstanding title by the American Library Association. Victoria Chang, the current New York Times Magazine Poetry Editor, has described Knowlton’s poetry as “devastatingly lyrical.” Recognition for her work includes an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Pushcart nomination. She regularly publishes her poetry in journals such as One Art and Trouvaille Review.
Julia Caroline Knowlton is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta and incoming President of the Georgia Poetry Society. She has an MFA in poetry from Antioch University and a PhD in French Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill. The author of four books and an Academy of American Poets prize winner, she was named a Georgia Author of the Year for her 2018 chapbook, The Café of Unintelligible Desire (Alice Greene & Co.). Her second chapbook, Poem at the Edge of the World, will be published by Alice Greene & Co. in 2022. Julia regularly publishes in journals including One Art, Roanoke Review, and Boston Literary Review.
Praise gray skies, wet yellow leaves fall to red edge. I wonder
why dark winter moves voices to fear every day, every night
of the dead. How hard we try to cover fear with wrong things—
hot meat gravy, a fat gold watch, words of wool, light cheer.
November song, empty me out to cloth without paint, barest
branches, a cup without wine. Move me to snow on evergreen pine.
*
Meditation in Winter
I draw an angel halo on paper, believing only in paper
not the gold shape itself. I light candles with a red-hot match.
I sing a bitter song or sweet, peel apples into butter and taste the past.
I write faint words, wash a dish. Enter crying darkness coming at last.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta and incoming President of the Georgia Poetry Society. She has an MFA in poetry from Antioch University and a PhD in French Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill. The author of four books and an Academy of American Poets prize winner, she was named a Georgia Author of the Year for her 2018 chapbook, The Café of Unintelligible Desire (Alice Greene & Co.). Her second chapbook, Poem at the Edge of the World, will be published by Alice Greene & Co. in 2022. Julia regularly publishes in journals including One Art, Roanoke Review, and Boston Literary Review.
Julia Caroline Knowlton is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. She has an MFA in poetry from Antioch University and a PhD in French Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill. The author of four books and an Academy of American Poets prize winner, she was named a GA Author of the Year for her 2018 chapbook, The Café of Unintelligible Desire (Alice Greene & Co.). Her second chapbook, Poem at the Edge of the World, will also be published by Alice Greene & Co. Julia regularly publishes in journals including One Art, Roanoke Review, and Boston Literary Review.
I tried the advice, writing about waves, ill fate,
petals like bells, eyes & lies, secrets to confess—
all other things that have fully been said.
Then last night, early spring, getting late,
trees black & still bare, you held me hard
in your arms. We were one, lit by it, entirely unknown—
full pearl button, huge sequin sewn in night’s lace dress.
*
Julia Caroline Knowlton is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, where she has taught for twenty-five years. She has a PhD in French Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University. The author of four books, she was named a Georgia Author of the Year in 2018. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a Pushcart nominee. Her work has recently appeared in literary journals such as Boston Literary Magazine and Raw Art Review. You can find her on Facebook.
Julia Caroline Knowlton is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, where she has taught for twenty-five years. She has a PhD in French Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University. The author of four books, she was named a Georgia Author of the Year in 2018. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a Pushcart nominee. Her work has recently appeared in literary journals such as Boston Literary Magazine and Raw Art Review. You can find her on Facebook.
End of summer, Michigan. Silver ash flight, going home to nothing in his favorite lake.
A final wave goodbye caught in wind and light, then into water down. I touched my own end,
dry & chalky. It was my father, leaving time forever, a vanishing act. No holy notions,
just bone dust in memory that does not fade. Wildflowers strewn on water while his jazz played.
Julia Caroline Knowlton is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, where she has taught for twenty-five years. She has a PhD in French Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in Poetry from Antioch University. The author of four books, she was named a Georgia Author of the Year in 2018. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a Pushcart nominee. Her work has recently appeared in literary journals such as Boston Literary Magazine and Raw Art Review. You can find her on Facebook.
