~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of July 2026 ~
Tag: LeeAnn Pickrell
Three Poems by LeeAnn Pickrell
Regret
“You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.”
From “Antilamentation,” Dorianne Laux
Embrace the lovers too quickly
balled up and tossed away
like that first draft. When a gasp
of wind sweeps the tree
and you want only the feeling
of falling, know nothing of time
spent raking, gathering, bagging,
clearing gutters of detritus
so water flows again. Admire
the metaphors that never
should have mixed. Some-
times you must blow
up your life to change,
watch embers smoulder,
the image others had of you
turn to ash. Every choice
brought you here, where you
sit now, having learned
the only way you could have—
the hard way—to clear the yard.
*
At the Equinox
For a moment day equals night
before the sun slips toward winter,
shadows reach farther each day.
The cat who’s blind still thinks he’s
an explorer darting toward the door
opened where we scoop him close.
Inside, the world stands still. How
many days I forget to step
outside the door and all I see
are corners. Turn around,
a friend used to say,
there’s a whole world
just outside. Autumn
for instance is a sigh, a breath
let out through pursed lips.
Yesterday, I held the cat against
my chest as if that could soften
the hurt of a broken world.
*
Solitary
Always the first to bed, she pulls
the covers over her shoulders.
She lives on a street of houses
built in the fifties. Eyes closed,
she travels to those other homes,
sees her neighbors in their own rooms:
a girl dreams of what she can’t yet
see around the bend of a life,
a boy plays video games
in his bedroom’s darkness, a man
watches a show about smugglers
while his partner sleeps, a book
falls onto a woman’s chest as she reads,
a baby fusses in a crib.
Next door a woman who lived
a whole life in that one house
shuffles her walker toward the bed.
Across the street the man who had
a stroke still leaves his lights on late.
All of them invisibly bound,
as the day’s eyes close,
by one asphalt ribbon of road.
*
LeeAnn Pickrell’s first collection Gathering the Pieces of Days was published in April 2025. Tsunami, a memoir about her experience in the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, will be out in August 2026, also from Unsolicited Press. See more at leeannpickrell.com.
A moment in Maui by LeeAnn Pickrell
A moment in Maui
Setting out at 5 a.m. for the sea turtles’
morning march into the water at Kalepolepo Park.
The night is as inky dark as the water.
A man says he counted twenty-eight turtles
two days ago. Today I see only
one turtle pop its head above the water
before descending again. But the moon is full,
reflecting the sun and the day to come.
For almost a week, I’ve tried to silence
the world’s cruelty, really our cruelty,
our chaos, our wars, our hearts closed
to others’ suffering. Later, volunteers
will put up flags to keep us twenty feet
from the turtles that return to nap at low tide.
Everything needs to be protected from us.
The clouds slowly pinken as I wade into the ocean,
and the moon falls into my opened palms.
*
LeeAnn Pickrell is a poet, freelance editor, and managing editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print journals, including ONE ART, Loud Coffee Press, Atlanta Review, and MacQueen’s Quinterly. She has a book forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Richmond, California, with her partner and two fabulous cats.
Two Poems by LeeAnn Pickrell
The other side of the front door
My parents sold the house on Forest Bend
without giving me a chance to see it one more time.
I had just gotten married. Maybe they thought
I didn’t care, lived in another state, would never
come home to live again. Home. That house on
Forest Bend, a house without trees, in a new
1967 subdivision. The house that surrounded me
in wood-paneled walls, blond brick, a fireplace
rarely lit, a pool where I lived my teenage
summers. Where I learned to drink behind
slammed doors, boundaries drawn and crossed.
The house where I played dress up, dancing in
the living room in Mardi Gras beads and my
mother’s pink negligée. The house where we ate
fondue, my mother wore brown hot pants,
a house of gin and scotch and the scent of Nina Ricci
perfume as my mother bent to kiss me goodnight,
the house where I played my tennis racket guitar
on the bright green carpet my dad had picked out.
The house I returned to when life fell apart,
where I could close the front door of a half-asleep
home that wouldn’t betray its inner secrets.
*
Hunting for a poem
Like the lone
snowy egret
hunts for breakfast
in the shallows of
Salmon Creek,
brackish from years
of drought.
Last week’s
atmospheric river,
the first rain since
winter and it’s
November now.
Fog drips from the eaves.
The ocean churns
on the other side
of the dunes.
Now I sit,
coffee in hand,
on the cottage’s
small sun porch
reaching for words
to feed a morning.
The egret
takes flight,
following the curve
of the creek
that has to stretch farther
to reach the ocean
every year.
*
LeeAnn Pickrell is a poet, freelance editor, and managing editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print journals, most recently in Loud Coffee Press, Atlanta Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and The Marin Poetry Review, and the anthologies Coffee Poems and A Gathering of Finches. She has a book forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Richmond, California, with her partner and two cats.