Tag: Lana Hechtman Ayers

ONE ART’s November 2026 Reading

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

ONE ART’s November 2026 Reading

Date: Sunday, November 8
Time: 2pm Eastern
Duration: 2 hours

Host: Mark Danowsky (Founder/EIC of ONE ART)

Featured Poets: Betsy Mars, Laura Daniels, J. C. Todd, Barbara Sabol, Lana Hechtman Ayers

FREE event!
(donations appreciated)

>> Register Here <<

*

~ About Our Featured Readers ~

Laura Daniels, a neurodivergent poet, is the founder and editor of The Fringe 999 Poetry Forum. Her poems appear in Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, and the Journal of New Jersey Poets, and she received a 2025 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Honorable Mention Award. She facilitates a free, monthly online writing workshop through Mary’s Place by the Sea for women whose lives have been touched by cancer. Her poetry collection Gentle Grasp (Kelsay Books) is available on Amazon. Her saddle-stitched chapbook, Jersey Baked (Four Feather Press), is available directly from the author. She resides with her partner in Mt. Arlington, NJ. Follow her at lauradanielswriter.wordpress.com.

Lana Hechtman Ayers shepherded over 150 poetry collections into print as managing editor for three small presses. Her latest collection of poems is A Hole in the Night (Blue Light Press, 2026). She lives in Oregon on unceded lands of the Yaqo’n people with her beloved husband and fur babies. On clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon. lanaayers.com

Barbara Sabol is an Akron-based poet living near the Cuyahoga Valley National Park whose trails she knows by heart. She is the author of seven poetry collections, and writes both traditional, free verse and short-form Japanese poetry. Her most recent collection is Mapping the Borderlands: Haibun and Tanka Prose (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025). Barbara’s work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council and recognized by the Haiku Society of America and the Haiku Foundation. She is a retired speech therapist, forever fascinated with language. Barbara conducts poetry workshops through Lit Cleveland. 

J. C. Todd is co-editor of Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Books, May 2026). She is author of three poetry collections, most recently the bilingual (English/Lithuanian) What Kept Me Awake/Kas neleido užmigti? and Beyond Repair. Before retiring, she taught in the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Program at Rosemont College. jc-todd.com

Betsy Mars is a poet, compulsive photographer, and an editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, SWWIM, the California Quarterly, Thimble, and the anthology Signed, Sealed, Delivered: The Motown Poetry Review (Madville Press). She is the author Rue Obscure (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), which was just released, as well as two chapbooks, Alinea, and In the Muddle of the Night, the latter co-written with Alan Walowitz. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and were chosen as the winner of the Alexandria Quarterly’s First Line Poetry Contest Series and of The Poetry Salon’s Practiced Poets Prize. Her photos have been featured in Spank the Carp, Soul Poetry, and used in Rattle as an ekphrastic prompt. She is a lifelong poet, writing her first poem (at age 5 or so) in Portuguese—an elegy for her cat—while her family lived in Brazil. More at betsymars.com

Haiku by Lana Hechtman Ayers

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

sky cloaked in smoke
only fires
breathe easy

*

Lana Hechtman Ayers shepherded over 150 poetry collections into print as managing editor for three small presses. Her latest collection of poems is A Hole in the Night (Blue Light Press, 2026). She lives in Oregon on unceded lands of the Yaqo’n people with her beloved husband and fur babies. On clear, quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon.

Free from Want by Lana Hechtman Ayers

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Free from Want

I never understood why my mother ordered less
pastrami than corned beef for Thanksgiving,
since it was pastrami, oozing grease like a Texas
oil derrick, that was more popular, devoured first
from our Kuck’s delicatessen spread—sour pickles
big around as my wrist, potato salad with hard-boiled eggs,
mustard and mayonnaise, plus carrot shavings for crunch,
my favorite, and coleslaw with purple cabbage strands,
always too sweet and swimming in a pool of vinegar,
plus fresh baked rye bread laced with carraway seeds,
sliced thick enough to load sandwich stuffings that could
rival the size of a turkey, I mean an entire intact bird,
not that I knew from family experience because
my mother would rather gargle lighter fluid
than deign to cook one of those creatures whose meat
she claimed stank like my father’s grimy work shirts,
but this was the one day of the year we could pig out
in public, I mean eat and eat and eat ourselves
into a sleep coma if we wanted to, and I did because
other days I had to be good, pretend I could stop
before my plate was empty, be full on half a meatball
and ten spaghetti strands carefully counted out,
being slopped on my plate with a ladle of watery red
gravy and a smidgen of mushy Green Giant canned
peas, as if these meager portions were enough to fill
the hole in my belly, the hole in my soul that ached
to be served the gooey chocolate confection of a single
I love you from my mother’s luscious, Kool-cigarette-bearing lips—
smoke and ash, that was what I gobbled every other day of the year.

*

Lana Hechtman Ayers is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press). Sky Over, her newest chapbook, is forthcoming in 2026. Recent poems appear in Peregrine, Blue Heron Review, and Bracken. Say hello online at lanaayers.com.

A Dream of Matzoh Ball Soup by Lana Hechtman Ayers

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

A Dream of Matzoh Ball Soup

My grandmother didn’t die of a stroke
when I was in college, no, no, no,

she rose up out of her wheelchair
& danced the hora with the nurses,

then came home to us & cooked
enough matzoh ball soup for an army

& forty years later, we’re still eating
that soup for supper, then raising hands

in the air in praise & later, after
she sings me to sleep with a Yiddish song

or two, I dream of her salt & pepper hair
blowing & glowing in the April light,

her eyes squinting to raisins
but when I wake it’s always raining

& she’s not here, not anywhere
but in the photo on my desk

& all that soup we’ve been consuming
is the ever salty broth of sorrow.

*

Lana Hechtman Ayers’ poems appear in Peregrine, The London Reader, and Rattle, among others. Her ninth poetry collection, The Autobiography of Rain is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.