Tag: Laurie Kuntz

Sticking With Poetry by Laurie Kuntz

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Sticking With Poetry

For Renee Good, mother, wife, sister, poet. Rest In Poetry

It is always the troll, rude and despicable
who posts the unfathomable comment:

She should have stuck with poetry

after she, the poet, the activist, the lover, the mother, friend, sister
was brutally gunned down.

She should have stuck with poetry,

but the poetry she stuck with
made her who she was that day
not angry, just trying to resist,
to be the voice
that poems are made of.

She stuck with poetry, or poetry stuck with her,
that’s why she was a woman who loved a child
who strived in the world she hoped to make better,
who resisted, spoke out about right and wrong,
she stuck with poetry, so her words can stick with us
as she rests in this poem.

*

Laurie Kuntz is a four time Pushcart Prize nominee and two time Best of the Net Nominee. In 2024, she won a Pushcart Prize. She published seven books of poetry. Her latest book published in 2025 is Balance, published by Moonstone Arts Center. In 2026, her 8th book, Shelter In Place will be published by Shanti Arts Press. Her themes come from working with Southeast Asian refugees, living as an expatriate in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brazil, and raising a husband and son.
Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

ONE ART’s December 2025 Reading

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ONE ART’s December 2025 Reading

Date: Sunday, December 7

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

Featured Poets: Amy Small-McKinney, Linda Laderman, Laurie Kuntz, Susan Michele Coronel

>>> Register Here <<<

FREE!

(Donations appreciated.)

About Our Featured Readers:

Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. She has received two Pushcart nominations and won the 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival First Poem Contest.  Her poems have appeared in publications including Spillway 29, Plainsongs, Redivider, and Fourteen Hills. In 2021 her full-length manuscript was a finalist for Harbor Editions’ Laureate Prize, and in 2023 another version of the manuscript was longlisted for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.

Learn more about Susan online at:

susanmichelecoronel.com/

Laurie Kuntz is an award-winning poet and film producer. She taught creative writing and poetry in Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. Many of her poetic themes are a result of her working with Southeast Asian refugees in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines after the Vietnam War years. In a past life, she was an ESL teacher and published two ESL texts that were used widely in ESL programs both nationally and internationally. She has published seven poetry collections. Her 8th book, a full length collection entitled Shelter In Place will be published in 2026 by Shanti Arts Press.

Learn more about Laurie online at:

lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Eclectica, The MacGuffin, SWWIM, Action Spectacle, The Westchester Review, and ONE ART. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online here. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University in Ohio. For nearly a decade she was a docent at the Zekleman Holocaust Center near Detroit.

Learn more about Linda online at: 

lindaladerman.com.

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others.  She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Learn more about Amy online at:

amysmallmckinney.com/

Four Poems by Laurie Kuntz

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The Pre-Test

It’s the printer again,
like a body growing old,
the ink runs dry,
invisible paper jams,
lights that flash without reason,
and I call to you, and you fix it.

After a thankful hug, I ask
What will I do without you?
This is surreal to think about
when I count backwards to our beginnings
tapping ten fingers more than five times.
These days are like spelling pretests
preparing for those difficult words that defy
the i before e rule.

When I look toward an unreliable future
everything becomes a test:
I can mow the lawn,
pay estimated taxes
kill the spider, which is really practice
for the roach, recognize the flashing fuel light,
and know when to press Ctrl Alt Delete,
the list of can do’s can go on forever,
only because we will not.

I know without you, I can
and will pass these tests,
but fail miserably at the same time.

*

Searching for Gold

Bracing the wind, Laura, in a red sock hat,
reads the instruction booklet of this holiday gift,
the metal detector you’ve wanted since you were a child,
growing up in rural places, where treasures were part of the lore.

Now, on an urban beach in January,
you search and dig, sand blowing in your aging face.
You yell against the rising tide, hoping Laura can hear,

It is more the hunt than the treasure that I love,

because you can see clearly,
that the treasure is standing next to you,
reading the instruction booklet.

*

Friendship, Like Marriage

In celebration for every year
of marriage, there is a symbol
the fragility of paper,
the merge of time,
the burning passion of wood
and copper in its polished shine.

What elements symbolize friendship
in its stretch of years,
and isn’t friendship a marriage in kind,
with its own separations and secrets
splayed across wires,
promises untied while riding waves
of unbridled trust.

My friend, for all our time together,
nothing more can be said except:
I do, I do, I do.

*

A Mother’s Work

It was twenty years ago,
the night you graduated from high school.
Of course, there was the after party,
and you swaggered into the house way after curfew.
You turned to me and said:
“Well, your work is done.”
In tired irony, I replied:
“It is 3:00 A.M., and I am still up,
my work will never be done.”
Today, marks a month before your daughter is due
to enter the world, and I, as a soon to be Grandmother,
should be thinking of bassinets and bottles,
but the memory of your post curfew high school after party
comes to me, as I am still up and waiting.

*

Laurie Kuntz is a four time Pushcart Prize nominee and two time Best of the Net Nominee. In 2024, she won a Pushcart Prize. She published seven books of poetry. Her latest book published in 2025 is Balance, published by Moonstone Arts Center. In 2026, her 8th book, Shelter In Place will be published by Shanti Arts Press. Her themes come from working with Southeast Asian refugees, living as an expatriate in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Brazil, and raising a husband and son.
Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Between by Laurie Kuntz

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Between

If our lives were lived in a straight line
like holding ends of a jump rope–
one turner madness, the other magic,
we would learn to rise in rhythm
with each arc of the rope and all that happens
in a moment of becoming airborne.

Between the landing and next jump
are the daily interactions that prove us human:

The nod of passing hikers scaling an uphill trail.
The placing of coins in a palm by the shopkeeper
after asking how your elderly mother is doing.
A screen door held open or gently shut
after shared cups of chamomile tea on a rainy day.
The manicurist who shapes your nails into a spring color palette.
A pitanga bush overhanging the bridge
never failing to drop its red dappled berries into the lap of April.

Each handshake, hug, and embrace
is a life in the telling, stories that will end
in a skip, jump, and final landing
between madness and magic.

*

Laurie Kuntz loves when her work finds a home in ONE ART. Other places her poetry has appeared are: Sparks of Calliope, Sheila Na Gig, Gyroscope Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, 3rd Wednesday, Ibbetson Street and others. After four previous nominations, she won a Pushcart Prize in 2024.

Two Poems by Laurie Kuntz

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Kansha Sai

That’s Japanese for Thanksgiving,
“The festival of gratitude.”
Here I am in Japan
at the end of November
alone, giving thanks.

It was a poet that said “Alone is a stone.”
Today the stones are shimmering
under a fading fall sun
and to be alone allows the landscape of memory
to stir under this wizened sky.

My son was once afraid of the sky,
he never wanted to look up
thinking he would be swallowed.

Today, I am thankful
he has gotten over that fear.
Thankful for much on this day
when bombs are going off elsewhere.
But there are always bombs going off,
and we carry our own inner grenades
waiting to explode into a sullen sky.

Yet, I remain grateful:

For sons, for stones that shimmer,
for an ebbing autumn,
knowing that alone, I am together
with so many who are like scattered seeds
ripening into buds and waiting to bloom
in all the places I am not.

*

My Son’s Sweatshirt

Father and son come by,
tell me they are going camping.
into woods, bear country, past scorpion rock
to black lakes carpeted with lichen stones visible only by toe-touch,

and I worry about my son’s pearl tipped toes
scraping all things jagged in dark pools having no bottom.

I tell him what to pack for this time with his father,
remind my son that he was named for survival,
I open the drawer where he keeps his warm clothes.

The car disappears into a single lane leading to thinner air,
when I can no longer see the trail of exhaust,
I turn back into the house
and see my son’s sweatshirt—forgotten.

Its rumpled form, deserted by the body of my son,
this gift, I continuously give to his father—
a father who I hope remembers
that in the woods, there are no sonatas to perfect,
and long division is just a maze of Manzanita bush.

I hang up the sweatshirt,
its collar pinned to a hook,
tonight my son will know the cold
and the sound of high mountain wind,
the only whisper tucking him in.

*

Laurie Kuntz has published two poetry collections (The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press and Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press), and three chapbooks (Talking Me Off The Roof, Kelsay Books, Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press, and Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press). Simple Gestures, won the Texas Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, and Women at the Onsen won the Blue Light Press Chapbook Contest. Her 6th poetry book, That Infinite Roar, will be published by Gyroscope Press at the end of 2023. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net Prize. Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila Na Gig, and many other literary journals. She currently resides in Florida, where everyday is a political poem waiting to be written. Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Anniversary, Again by Laurie Kuntz

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Anniversary, Again

I don’t know a love that does not chip away
at the day to day of what couples us.
Every act of creation, also an act of destruction,
and memory is history’s great reviser.

The years pass, the regrets mount,
but so does the shared light
we both enjoy at sunset.
And, there’s the song of the brown thrasher
hidden in our magnolia tree.

We strain to catch a glimpse before it flies–
this memory implanted on its wingspread
soaring away with a piece of what’s been shared.

Things we mark as love
belong in no engraved setting,
but seen in the dusting of grey hairs off the vanity,
the sweeping of the dead
palmetto bug from under the porch light,
ripe pears in a bowl placed on the table,
all marking the tart juice of our shared years.

The days pass as starlings ignore
the boundaries of the skyway.
We remain together under the weight
of every season, standing some days
on a stark precipice weaving stories
into our own private landscape,
all we let in under the presence
of every necessary ripening thing
like these collected years.

*

Laurie Kuntz is a widely published and award-winning poet. She has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net prize. She has published two poetry collections (The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press, Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press), two chapbooks (Simple Gestures, Texas Review, Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press). Her 5th poetry collection, Talking Me off the Roof, is forthcoming from Kelsay Press in late 2022. Recently retired, she lives in an endless summer state of mind. Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/

That’s What You Say by Laurie Kuntz

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That’s What You Say

My mother died
in a shared room
at a nursing home,

while aides sat in the illuminated pod
their white canvas shoes resting
on the cold tile floors.

Time of death was 4:38 A.M.
Death appears in a stormy river,
or on a placid lake shore.

Hours and minutes do not matter,

for death sets no alarm,
hurries no nurse to gently
palm a wrist and look for a pulse.
 
 
When we came to collect her clothes
that smelled of mold and brittle bones,
and gather her meager belongings:

a half filled bottle of ballet pink nail polish,
one earring, a hair clip, and a velvet box,
which once held a gold charm bracelet,
 
 
I imagine her calling for one of us
to pluck the coarse grey hairs
that protruded from her chin like thorns.

Lost in reveries of tasks and memories
when my sister’s tears broke,
the frail woman in the neighboring bed insisted

She went peacefully,

but how could she know?
What possible revelation
comes to witness at 4:38 in the morning?

*

Laurie Kuntz is a widely published and award winning poet. She has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net prize. She has published two poetry collections (The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press, Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press), two chapbooks (Simple Gestures, Texas Review, Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press). Her 5th poetry collection, Talking Me off the Roof, is forthcoming from Kelsay Press in late 2022. Many of her poems are a direct result of working with refugees in refugee camps soon after the Vietnam War years. Recently retired, she lives in an endless summer state of mind. Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com