Tag: Michael T. Young

Even on the Darkest Night by Michael T. Young

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Even on the Darkest Night

A child makes a wish
not because he believes stars
he can’t see will grant it
but because in the garden
there’s a moonflower
that his mother let him stay up
to see bloom in the dark,
the only time it opens,
and when it blesses the world
with its perfume, a scent
his mother calls “heavenly.”

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Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Books January 15, 2026. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Rattle, and Vox Populi.

ONE ART’s September 2025 Reading

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ONE ART’s September 2025 Reading

We’re pleased to announce ONE ART’s September 2025 Reading!

Date: Sunday, September 7

Time: 2:00pm Eastern

Featured Poets: James Crews, Gloria Heffernan, William Palmer, Michael T. Young, Andrea Potos

>>> Tickets Available <<<

Free!

(Donations appreciated.)

The official event is expected to run approximately 1-hour.

After the reading, please consider sticking around for approximately 30-minutes of Community Time discussion with our Featured Poets.

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~ About Our Featured Poets ~

James Crews is the author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Courage & Self-Compassion, and editor of several bestselling poetry anthologies, including Love Is for All of Us, a collection of LGBTQ+ love poems. He is also the author of four poetry collections and lives in Southern Vermont with his husband. For more info: www.jamescrews.net

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Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books).  Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

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William Palmer’s poetry has appeared in Ecotone, I-70 Review, JAMA, ONE ART, Rust & Moth, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.  

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Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, Mid-Atlantic Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Vox Populi.

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Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem.  You can find her at andreapotos.com

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Two Poems by Michael T. Young

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The Baroque Edge

We think of people in the past
as stuffed shirts, stiff in confines
of etiquette and rules, but
Bach carried a sword
on his long walks. Handel
would have died in a duel,
except for a well-placed button
that deflected the blade. So
maybe there’s an edge to
The Well-Tempered Clavier
that we fail to catch, or
a crosscurrent cutting across
The Water Music and imperceptibly
drawing us, gently nudging us, like
a gesture of defiance made
toward the dark depths, out
at the edges where
the silence growls and paces.

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Erased

I sit in the dark listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.
It’s a night a long way into the new world.

I can see its outlines in how this last movement
is a prolonged diminishment, one instrument at a time

disappearing into silence, like the loss of so many things:
we hardly notice them gone until we can’t hear them,

like a friend moving farther and farther away into a distance
that finally is too remote for us to reach across,

or freedom to speak our mind dwindled by a word
here, a word there. And there goes another violin

sinking into the absence of what we believed in,
who we thought we were, a kind of people who

could defy every power contrary to us. What it meant
to be American. But here I am, in the dark, on a cold night

deep into the new country, listening to an Austrian composer.
Now the cost of the needed medicine or food

drives us to work so late, we’re always tired
and there’s only collapsing into a moment of exhaustion

at the end of a day, watching TV or listening to music,
until that last violin holds as long as it can the final note,

a melodic fragment that Mahler marked in his German script,
a notation meaning “completely dying away.”

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Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, Mid-Atlantic Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Vox Populi.

Three Poems by Michael T. Young

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Birds that Migrate

I love the idea of how far they travel,
their ability to find their way over such distances
impresses those of us who tend to stay put.

And yet their noncommittal ways are unsettling.
How it seems as if they always have a bag packed
and ready to go. So, I feel a need to hold back,

to keep something of myself secret, just in case
I wake to find the other side of the bed cold
and their part of the closet clean. We never really

came to know each other, both of us long ago,
elsewhere, imagining how much better
life would be if the other were here.

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Market

What is the price of a past I wondered
as we walked long aisles of crafts and antiques
dusted in what seemed an even more
antique light, history’s discards stacked on tables,
in stalls, beside old lamps, bowls and plates,
coins and stamps spread among clocks, cabinets,
chests, and racks of books. As we browsed
these prized marketable memories, we
nibbled Dutch cakes, cookies, brittle, and jerky.
Here we paused at a table of rings.
Rows of silver circles, knobbed and knotted
with different designs and images. My daughter
fished out one with a mushroom, reminder
of Alice coiled in smoke rings of Wonderland.
My son discovered a sleeping dragon.
I thought of the name of this old farmers market:
Green Dragon. When young and growing up
not far away, I imagined it a place of fire and danger,
and a gold burning light, the heat of a magic
that could transform anything into a shield
against different kinds of cold. In the ‘50s
it was the site of a cold war exercise called
“Operation Disaster.” Patrol planes strafed
the parking lot targeting people with fake bombs,
emergency personnel tended the fake wounded,
and a crowd of thousands gathered to see
who wouldn’t make it. But like a movie,
even the dead escaped alive. Now, among
descendants of the survivors, I sorted
through rings wanting to find something
meaningful in the heaps, something
I could see stamped there in the image
on its metal, even if I couldn’t name it. But
there was nothing that meant enough, and
we left for the long drive home, everyone else
content with what they found and carried away.
It was autumn, trees along the interstate
had turned yellow. The road climbed up
through a valley, lifting us toward the sunlight,
its gold threads cross stitched by birds flying
from tree line to tree line, until the air became
a curtain of gold and I looked up into it,
feeling myself rising into its radiance.

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The Shapes of Loneliness

At first I think of footsteps
echoing down an alley or hallway,
a door clicking shut, maybe even
the sound of clippers snipping a bush.
Some isolated moment. But
it’s various, and even highly textured
like a scallop shell, ridges segmenting
space into discrete feelings,
separate ideas of how things
should have been before life split
into you and me, the time before
and the time after a friendship,
a marriage, a life. Now what’s left
retreats into the spiral recess
of a nautilus, so even when found
on a beach among crowds
of other shells, what can be heard
in any one of them is the distance
that can never again be traveled.

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Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Pinyon, Talking River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Vox Populi.

Two Poems by Michael T. Young

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What’s Owed

On some stretches of a drive overnight,
darkness is dense enough to seem mystical,
like a breath held so long it hardens
into a black ore. I sometimes think
if I look deeply, my eyes could drill

to the bottom and perceive its value.
But off-road station signs burn through
the tree line with a distracting cost,
a banality highlighted by advertisements
and rest stops, so I never quite see it.

In the passenger seat, my wife stares,
as if something lurks in the shadows
just ahead. At this late hour, the world
is like a promise that might not be broken,
but also a skin that twitches under threat.

Exhaustion blurs the border of vision
toward dream and a kind of betrayal,
like dear leaping from the black shapes
and over the guardrail. I think of my
children in the back seat, who,

in their deep sleep, hold to something
I can’t reach, no matter how many miles
I drive. And I keep thinking of Dido, the price
she paid for loving someone who believed
he had no choice but to keep traveling.

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Education

Mother quietly cried into her perfectly made
potato soup because father kissed another woman.
That starch warmed my chest going down,
and I could feel the stiffness in my pockets.

It’s why, for my entire life, I couldn’t seem
to pay enough for what was needed.
Back home, the plants were watered
but the shades were drawn, so they paled.

Father filled the crock outside the bedroom
with cigarette butts, the odor of ash and spent days
weighed the air and dampened every word
drifting through the halls among us.

So even when I was young everything I said
was stale. My phrases were brittle like paper
in old books. And I always spoke carefully,
trying to keep every broken thing from falling apart.

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Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award for his collection, Living in the Counterpoint. He also received honorable mention for the 2022 New Jersey Poets Prize. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including Main Street Rag, Pinyon, RATTLE, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Vox Populi.

Two Poems by Michael T. Young

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The Problem with Keeping Score

Road trips, drinks with friends, long walks
through woods, through cities.
It’s impossible to know how it all adds up.

Or what the losses will take. Maybe
that’s why we like games. They’re simple:
someone wins, someone loses

and there are numbers to prove it.
But you can’t score how morning light
dances around the rims of the eyes

you’ve fallen in love with, or the beauty
of rain multiplying clouds down the street,
how it is an unaccountable mercy

to have run even once through those baptisms
and come out the other end full of such joy,
you let the other guy win just to see him smile.

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Middle Passage

“At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever
the brutalizing effects of slavery upon slave and
slaveholder.”
—Frederick Douglass

Tracts of coral reef snaking under the waves,
the uncharted trails of seals and seabirds
are histories written in currents of erasure.
Yet they’ve endured longer than our books.
We have founded currencies on their shells,
industries of slavery that have come and gone
and come again, because the human story
rises like a tide of persistent calcifying spaces.
Gulls cry across those vacancies, scanning
for life in the waves, tucked within
the momentary voids, searching for that heart
before it falls like marine snow, down through
fathoms of water, and into a darkness so deep
there is no human name by which to call it.

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Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. He received honorable mention for the NJ Poets Prize for 2022 from The Journal of New Jersey Poets. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including Pinyon, River Heron Review, Talking River Review, and Vox Populi.

Storytelling by Michael T. Young

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Storytelling

A man standing in the middle of 42nd Street said,
“Happiness is a cave with WiFi and my favorite beer.”

I believed him because he was naked
and the police were converging on him.

When he stretched out on the hot asphalt,
a pigeon crossed overhead from marquee to marquee.

That’s how I knew he was telling the story of our age.
Some reporter may write down his proclamations,

distinguish by them the gun from the plough,
and teach how stories caught in empty bottles

howl as long congressional breaths over their rims,
and other stories calcify into shells with seawater

cupped in their nacreous bowls. The differences in them
are that the final scripture etched in their salts

guides us to sip from troughs imparting the wisdom
that a hug is warmer than a smoking gun

and while your story is more interesting: hiking the Himalayas,
sharing shots of slivovitz with painters in Prague,

or your knees giving out at the World Trade Center Site
remembering you survived that day by two or three minutes—

it’s not my story. It would be thievery for me to tell it.
And though I was there that day too, I kept walking,

am walking still, so my story goes untold
because my knees are stronger, because telling a story

means stopping and sitting down, maybe with a beer,
maybe lying down on the hot asphalt until they carry you away.

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Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, Gargoyle Magazine, One, RATTLE, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.