Tag: Laura Grace Weldon

Updated: ONE ART’s July 2025 Reading

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Updated: ONE ART’s July 2025 Reading

A slight change in line-up for ONE ART’s July 2025 reading. Laura Grace Weldon will be joining us!

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

The reading will be held on Sunday, July 20 at 2pm Eastern.

The official event is expected to run approximately 2-hours.

After the reading, please consider sticking around for ~ 30-minutes of Q&A with Featured Poets & Community Time (general conversation).

About Our Featured Poets:

Alison Luterman has published four previous collections of poetry, most recently In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press,) and Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press.) Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Sun, Rattle, and elsewhere. She writes and teaches in Oakland, California. www.alisonluterman.net

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her two books are: No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot. Poetry credits include The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, and Plume. 

Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, leads writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura is the author of four books with a fifth due out in 2025 from Sheila-Na-Gig. Her background includes teaching nonviolence, writing poetry with nursing home residents, facilitating support groups for abuse survivors, and writing sardonic greeting cards. Laura lives on a small Ohio homestead where she and her husband host occasional art parties and house concerts. lauragraceweldon.com  

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

Three Poems by Laura Grace Weldon

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I Dream Of Hubble’s Law
I’m standing in front of my mother, head tugged
while she braids my hair as she does every morning.
I am seven years old, she must be late 30s.
Her lipstick is bright red, her hair nearly black.
Taster’s Choice freeze-dried coffee in her cup,
Cleveland news and weather on the radio.
My baby brother bangs his spoon,
smile-flinching each time it strikes.
My sister and father are at the table, all of us
unaware we’re in my dreamworld,
unaware we are inexorably moving away
from each other the way stars grow more distant.
Stand still she says as she fastens a tiny rubber band
at the bottom of each braid so I don’t turn around
to hug her as I long to in my dream. I want to hang on
for dear life as galaxies move apart ever faster
in a universe widening toward absolute zero.
*
Greenlings
They spring out the door,
compressed by inside rules:
slow down, lower your voice,
put away your toys. They whinny,
canter, jump, barely able to keep
to the confines of boots and coats.
The desire to inhabit themselves
is strong as a stream’s mandate to flow.
In them I see once-wobbly foals
grow into their knees, their power.
Three children radiant
as late winter light through eyelids
I close for an in-breath’s cherishing.
Their greenling calls stir the air, leaping
beyond whatever holds them in.
*
Hang In There
Memory summons the third-grade classroom
poster of a kitten, soft gray and white fur,
front paws desperately clutching a rope.
A silly font read Hang In There!
I tried to avoid looking at the wall
at all because I couldn’t bear
the kitten’s beseeching eyes, could
feel its desperation in my stomach,
my throat. It dangled over an abyss,
its weary claws my hands.
        Men in movies hung from building edges
        or helicopter skids. Any woman in the scene
        threw her hands over her mouth, helplessly
        pretty and pettable. In theaters, people clapped
        when the hero—against all odds— pulled himself up.*
I walk back in my mind to that classroom,
find the poster tidy as the day it was tacked up,
reach in, take that kitten into my nine-year-old arms
where I feel its tiny heart flutter
as it calms, finally, after all these years.
        *Mythbusters episode 138 demonstrated some adults can hold on from
        a three inch ledge for only about one minute, less for a one inch ledge.
        Not one participant could pull themselves up.
*
Laura Grace Weldon lives in a township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books.

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

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~ 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!)

Ordinary Substance by Laura Grace Weldon

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Ordinary Substance

Our implausibly tough luck
suggests the floor is lava,
the apple is poison,
the underbed monster
is on the loose

yet proves, time after time,

benevolent strangers,
enchanted gardens, and
magic potions are also real
each entirely made of
an ordinary substance—

Gratitude.

Don’t imagine some
sweet scented gauzy thing
held together with whispers.

Her power grows muscled
with use. It can be summoned
instantly, even during the most
wretched trials.
Especially then.

Gratitude’s face may be bittersweet,
but her feet
are on the ground.
Try to knock her down,
she will rise for another round.
She will rise and rise and rise.
You will rise with her.

*

Laura Grace Weldon lives on a small ramshackle farm where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card each week. Laura served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Connect with her at lauragraceweldon.com and on the twits @earnestdrollery.

Invisible Country by Laura Grace Weldon

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Invisible Country

When I was a sad, sleepless child
I created a country only I could see.
Tiny trees, tiny birds and flowers,
tiny darling houses imagined in detail
to best please inhabitants
so small that my face, looking on,
might be large and distant as the moon.
When flowers grew thirsty,
I made soft rain fall. When I grieved,
I gave them holidays with songs, games,
gifts. Never let them hear
thunder’s rumble in my world.

I didn’t expect the people I tended
so sweet might argue, might bully,
might wreck homes I envisioned
as serene. Couldn’t figure out
how to bring order back.
Realized I’d made myself a god,
one with powers I didn’t want.
So I stopped ruling their world,
let them go on without me
in a country so free
I never gave it a name.

*

Laura Grace Weldon was 2019’s Ohio Poet of the Year. She’s written three poetry collections: Portals (Middle Creek 2021), Blackbird (Grayson 2019), and Tending (Aldrich 2013). Laura works as a book editor, teaches writing, and maxes out her library card each week. Connect with her at lauragraceweldon.com

Two Poems by Laura Grace Weldon

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Falling From the Hay Wagon

I stand on square bales piled 10 feet high,
pushing them to the edge for others to stack
as July sun shoves between barn boards
in hot dust-ridden stripes.
All of us weary, chaff stuck to sweat
after a long day of haying
in heat dry as the cracked creek bed.
A Benadryl haze makes my limbs
feel like pudding, so wobbly I’m sillier
than usual as I wade to the edge,
still chortling as I trip, tip over,
fall to the barn’s dirt floor,
landing hard between wagon and post,
jeans somehow intact
against a pitchfork’s rusty tines.
I’m jolted into silence
until I find I’m fine,
me, the worrier
who never sees what’s coming.
My family leans over me, aghast
while I lie in the dust laughing
at all the good fortune we have sown.

*

Uneven Ground

He wants to fill in the pasture’s low spots.
I say no, no, no
these are magic spaces.
When winter comes they ice overnight
to crunch like candy under toddler boots.
Each spring, puddles leap into being,
just deep enough to wriggle with tadpoles.
Drying into mud, they entice butterflies
to drink salts in a crowded aerial whiffle.
Why even anything out?
These depressions of ours
hold so much.

*

Laura Grace Weldon is the author of the poetry collections Blackbird and Tending, as well as a handbook of alternative education titled Free Range Learning. She was named Ohio Poet of the Year for 2019. Her background includes teaching nonviolence workshops, writing collaborative poetry with nursing home residents, and facilitating support groups for abuse survivors. She works as a book editor, teaches community writing classes, and lives on a small farm. Connect with her at lauragraceweldon.com.