~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of May 2026 ~
Tag: Laura Grace Weldon
Two Poems by Laura Grace Weldon
Swedish Death Cleaning
“You can’t have everything.
Where would you put it?” ~ Steven Wright
My black hole of a bedroom closet
still holds long-impossible size eights,
tattered protest posters, slumped purses,
homemade Halloween costumes,
and hopeful eyes facing the future
from a box of black and white portraits.
Each object a doorway into realms
Where light no longer escapes.
I’ve already donated the strappy red dress
I never wore, the tie-dyed jumpsuit I did.
I gave stacks of sweaters to a friend who felts.
Sewed a sturdy quilt out of old jeans.
Cut squares from shirts too torn to donate
to patch shirts I still wear.
Time here distorts.
Decades seem mere seconds.
My arms are full with an enormity
possessions never encompass.
There’s no packing for an event horizon
but, oh look, here’s a child-decorated pillowcase
and there, a poncho I made from a shower curtain.
From this dense gravitational field
I work to excavate my own buried self
from all the women I didn’t become.
*
Look At Them Fly
My grown children may as well be
prop planes pulling banners
I squint to read
as they loop high in the sky.
They land for a bit, accept hugs,
tolerate a meal or two, some even
take leftovers I urge on them.
My love is larger than
any of us can fully bear.
It’s a fact immutable as the moon
drifting farther from Earth
at the same rate fingernails grow.
Before they were born in the usual way
I calculated with the wrong variables,
equated love with grief, but becoming
a mother to these exact marvels
erased all that. I cannot do the math,
only exult in these four.
Here I am on the ground they fly from,
my hands out offering tomatoes I’ve grown,
hot sauce I fermented, the pie I hope
is the one they still like.
*
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 and was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year. 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
You Can’t See It But It’s There by Laura Grace Weldon
You Can’t See It But It’s There
I’m not talking the magnetosphere or God
or seeds waiting in the frozen soil
or medicine careening through my bloodstream.
I’m talking pottery glaze to a seven-year-old.
She’s chosen a pretty pale pink to paint a ceramic pig
with a slightly less pale pink for its nose and ears.
Her concentration is enviable as she brushes
nearly invisible glaze over the little round body
By the time I explain it will turn out pink, for real,
she’s using a hairlike brush to add tiny black eyes
and hooves. I worry. Will she be disappointed?
Has my parking meter expired? Is democracy ending?
When I pick up the kiln-fired pig its glossy perfect pink testifies
to her faith. The way people singing, marching, standing up
for their neighbors in this perilous time does mine.
*
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 and was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year. 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
Updated: ONE ART’s July 2025 Reading
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
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
~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2023 ~
Ordinary Substance by Laura Grace Weldon
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
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
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.