Tag: Michelle Bitting

Running Away with It by Michelle Bitting

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment
Running Away with It My eyes say to my arms, my legs, my knees: we will move like music through the world. We will bend and sway with the trees—an atmospheric river rising, stalling time with our juiciest leaps. They may target our bodies & air, coax monumental melts of glaciers, threaten lunches of government cheese. Still, we swarm, spinning a storm, a choreography of hip things shaking, our riots composed of feet. Rave pirouettes rung with fire. The Waters of March in our toes. A quaking bee-line formation, a renegade dance flooding streets. Lit with love, kindred color, known desire. So it blows. No one needs a weatherman when we are the wind.

*

Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Master Artist Project Grantee and is the author of seven poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. She won the 2025 Banyan Review Poetry Prize, and her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry, prose, and essays appear on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, The Glacier, Heavy Feather Review, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, Gargoyle, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Spring, 2026. Bitting is writing a hybrid novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

ONE ART’s August 2025 Reading

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

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

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

The reading will be held on Sunday, August 17 at 2pm Eastern.

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

After the reading, please consider sticking around for Community Time discussion with our Featured Poets.

About Our Featured Poets:

Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Among her publications are a memoir, a children’s book and three poetry chapbooks. She was twice named a Georgia Author of the Year in the poetry category. Julia offers private instruction online in addition to her full load of college teaching.

Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grantee and is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Heavy Feather Review, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Fall, 2025. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author who has been passionate about writing since age seven. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, explores healing through unsent letters. She is currently seeking a literary agent and publisher for Pieces of Us, along with six chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections.

She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group and creative community, and is drawn to stories that explore survival, identity, and the complexity of being human.

Her work has recently appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Her debut poetry collection, Myths in the Feed: Poems of Performance, Pain & Perseverance, was just released from Crying Heart Press!

Sonia Greenfield (she/they) is the author of four poetry collections: All Possible Histories (Riot in Your Throat), Helen of Troy is High AF (Harbor Editions), Letdown (White Pine Press), and Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market (Codhill Press). Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Southern Review, Willow Springs and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College, edits the Rise Up Review, and advocates for neurodiversity and the decentering of the cis/het white hegemony. More at soniagreenfield.com.

Late Afternoon by Michelle Bitting

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Late Afternoon

Beyond the limits
of longing
a patchwork
of shadows and light
because winter
and a window
and the other side
of the pane
a frozen sun
its trembling, dappled display
where leaves are dropping
what you have been
you have
the potential to become
again, I said
I want to travel the world
he said
imagining the country
a French chateau
a girl in a room
lifting her chapeau
thick with books
thick as a forest
lullaby
and thought
an alchemy
warming his cheeks
to Rosicrucian
where I have seen fire
inside the walls
and a message
burning
it says— thou art God

*

Michelle Bitting is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in July 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Catamaran, SWWIM, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

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

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

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

  1. Abby E. Murray – Three Poems
  2. Betsy Mars – Delivery
  3. Mick Cochrane – Dabbs Greer
  4. Roseanne Freed – My wet eyes stared into their lights
  5. James Diaz – Once More, Into The Light
  6. Linda Laderman – On Thanksgiving no one wants to hear poetry
  7. Dick Westheimer – CT Scan Assay
  8. Michelle Bitting – Poor Yorick
  9. Lynne Knight – Three Poems
  10. Karen Paul Holmes – Two Poems  

Poor Yorick by Michelle Bitting

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Poor Yorick

On the lip of descent into chaos, my spirit
yearns for halcyon hours,
a longing for daisies, for excavated
jest, for the brother who slung me
like a cross over his shoulders
walking home from school, past
parochial lawns and gnarled
oaks, their old man steeple arms, past
Witchy Witchy Wilson’s house—
spinster lady with unkempt hair
we’d glimpse on occasion watering her pansies
with a droopy black hose, a broken-necked
swan regurgitating rivers
into the eyes of her violet blooms. Everyone
crossed the street to avoid contact,
in case she cast a spell
or tried to eat us—the irony being
that when she died
she wasn’t found for weeks
and rumor had it and neighborhood kids tattled
how her cats had nibbled away
at the decomposing flesh, alone
in a cruel world that doesn’t touch
or move you until the full dark duende
shovels your dankest soil up
and with it the skull you name Brother,
the one who went crazy
years after he piggy-backed you home
but a minute ago, wasn’t it?
I can hear his tender laughter
and I can touch the clown suit
made of many-colored squares mother sewed
that he loved to wear on Halloween,
big enough for a 6ft. man—the pleated
blue and white gingham collar
with pinking-sheared edges
that flared and circled his neck like a quilted corona,
his smile belying the pit
of goblins buried in his gut—
an inexplicably princely
and decaying gorgeous core
where worms grow fat as little gods
orbiting the dirt, or
thrumming and laughing beneath
sidewalks, the rotten marks
and hard-won steps
of brothers and sisters,
(and every living fool
when you think of it)
who eventually comes to pass.

*

Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, the 2021 Fish Poetry Contest judged by Billy Collins, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She won Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruminate Magazine, 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. She is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize and a recipient of a Starred Kirkus Review; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.