Tag: mom

Five Poems by Andrea Potos

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THE FRIENDSHIP

The week
when she wrote:

You and I will
explore Truth together,

my heart
signed on instantly:

Yes,
though nothing followed–

they were words
only, after all;

I who am one who believes
in words, words

have rescued my life, after all.
Some say words are cheap;

I say, they
are costlier than you know.

*

SADNESS IS ON ITS WAY

I can hear the foghorns,
skies a drizzled mist,
clouds sodden
with grey weight
as if with so much
to let go of,
so much to say.

*

THE MOMENT I SENSED MY MOTHER WAS LEAVING

Standing in the mist-
drizzled green of Connemara,
the Wild Atlantic Way thousands of miles
from my mother in the rehab home,
I called to make sure she knew
I’d be back in four days.
I needed to ask her
how she was that morning– her voice
weakened and crackling across the vastness–
Just fair, she said,
Unable, for the first time in my life,
to offer the reassurance
for the daughter she loved so well-
it was then I knew.

*

WHEN MY WIDOWER NEIGHBOR INVITES ME
TO COME AND TAKE WHATEVER I WANT
FROM HIS WIFE’S WARDROBE

Three dressing rooms of voluminous wonder,
ballroom gowns, brocaded jackets
and scarves, leather purses and shoes,
and dressers filled with nightwear and tops.
I browsed and lingered, stayed for nearly an hour.
When I opened the deepest mahogany drawer, I found
a pale pink sweater, cloud-soft,
patterned all over with lipstick prints.
I thought of my mother, all the years
of her beloved Revlon shades.
I might have felt her then
tap my shoulder: Here is some love
from me honey–take it–
and I did.

*

WHEN OUR FAVORITE RESTAURANT CLOSES
         for Mom

Though you’ve been gone
nearly ten years now,
I’d drive the eighty miles
to go there–the glass doors still
opening for both of us.
I’d order our coffee
in their thick ceramic mugs,
then slices of their legendary
blueberry pie for take-home–
heaping with plump berries,
no crust on top, cold, with clouds
of whipped cream for later.
Each bite would remind me.
Now I must find
another place for us–
I want a location to point to,
to say, here, Mom, let’s go together,
I’ll pick you up at noon.

*

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

Two Poems by Hayden Saunier

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Something Is Not Right

My neighbors never turn off the light
in an upstairs room, so one eye
seems always open in the face of that house
which is how ducks sleep, and dolphins,
and wary parents of teenagers, like my sister,
who woke one night as certain of catastrophe
as the French nurse in a children’s book,
so she drove in her robe and nightgown to the house
where her daughter was sleeping over
in time to watch four girls crawl out a bedroom window,
drop to the ground and head toward town.
She stepped from her car, called their names
in the ragged-whispered voice of conscience,
watched them scramble back inside the house.
That’s the god we were taught we had.
God of highway guardrails
and get-your-butt-back-in-that-house.
God of adults not too drunk or damaged
to keep us safe. A clear-eyed god, unmoved
by megachurch money and gold filigree.
God as shepherd, like my sister, standing
under bright stars in a dark world,
nightgown hitched up in a robe sash, boots on,
ready to chase the young ones back to the fold,
away from the wolves, at least for that night.

*

Perfume Notes

An overwhelming waft of fake peachiness
stings my eyes from a bar of discounted soap

and it’s almost as awful as the sugary pink
aroma of Summer’s Eve strawberry douche

that stunk up the family bathroom
at an inlaw’s house— good god, decades ago—

and because memory mainlines scent,
every dissonance I ever ignored for love

comes back to me. I was young.
It takes time to trust your nose.

I dump the soap in a corner of the dirt cellar
to ward off mice, and I’m further back,

age six, in Erica’s damp brick basement,
concocting a magic fragrance from her perfume kit

that turned the gray world Technicolor
but I spilled the entire vial and never could

remake that mix. I pause halfway up
the outside steps and linger in the rich bouquet

of earth, cool bottom note to all our lives.
To this, I’d add dark roasted coffee, drying hay,

the spicy sweetness of mock orange in the air,
atomized atop the mammal musk of skin.

It’s taken years to know what scents to trust.
I douse my life with them.

*

Hayden Saunier is the author of six poetry collections, including her most recent book Wheel. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and Gell Poetry prize, and has been published in ONE ART, The Sun, 32 Poems, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. Hayden founded and directs the interactive poetry performance group No River Twice. More at haydensaunier.com.

Three Poems by Shonté Daniels

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Bodysong

Before my mother’s death, my heart and mind lived five states away / and when she died they lived three states away, and when / I left my marriage, they moved in together / living in different rooms, but close enough for one to hear / the other crying or dancing to music / that moves through the house like a soundtrack / – not the original heartbeat, but a remix / think the beat of one song / behind the lyrics to another. // My mother’s death revealed my mother’s song / a death that could be mine if I choose to inherit it / lament with little groove / life I couldn’t have because I refused to take it.

*

My Heaven

I know you said I’d see you as a black cat with yellow ribbon, but I saw you
         as a marigold

next to an open field that looked to me like heaven. You were off to the side, away
         from the crowd

of wildflowers and grassy hills. You were, as you were in life, doing your own thing. I know
         my heaven looks nothing

like yours. You prefer tall buildings and busy streets. You want to travel in slink and shadow
         like an alley cat

unbothered and unattached, but today you came rooted as a small flower with yellow leaves
         sparse – just enough.

 

*

Farewell to All the Hypothetical Lives I Refuse to Have

Mississippi girl on horseback, good
gumbo. New Yorker, trendsetter. Midwestern
mom with the warm home. Farewell to that life, and the next,

and the next, like water that makes
the river I frequent. Goodbye turtles,
sunbathing on rocks and heavy, broken branches.

Shiny silver dollars. Farewell
to the only child, the background singer,
the lonely wife – whose only touch she feels

is from the steady linger of the fading summer sun.

*

Shonté Daniels is a poet and game developer in Maryland. Her poetry has appeared in several publications, including Puerto del sol, Ambit, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. Her essays on gaming has been published in Vice Gaming, Kotaku, Deorbital, and others.

Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC by Alison Seevak

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Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC

There are no mothers here
but when your daughter
invites you, you go and sit
on the wooden bench, grateful
to be there, after months
of silence. You sit next to the girl
holding the ring that fell
from her septum the night before
while your daughter’s in back,
getting the stud in the cartilage
of her left ear replaced
with a thin gold hoop.
It’s a rook, she’d explained
before the dark eyed piercer
with the sleeve of tattoos
called her name.
She’d traced the map
on the wall, showed you
the geography of all the ways
an ear can be pierced.
Conch, orbital, daith, helix.
Snakebites,
the name for the silver
studs dotting each side
of her lower lip. The post jutting
through her left eyebrow
looks like it hurts,
but it doesn’t, she said
and you remember
other waiting rooms,
pediatrician, orthodontist,
math tutor, ice rink,
the ER when she was five,
fell out of bed, and broke
her collar bone. The nurse
pulled you into the long corridor
so they could talk to her alone,
so they could make sure
it was not you
who had done the damage.

*

Alison Seevak’s writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including The Sun, Literary Mama and Atlanta Review. She lives in Northern California.

One thing you could do by Mary Paterson

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One thing you could do

is rent an apartment that is unfurnished
except for a large television
and a brown settee. You could go there
two to three times per week

to watch true crime documentaries
and cry about your mum. The deal is
you tell no one. At home you maintain
your days all perfectly ordinary:

magnet parking tickets to the fridge,
recycle cardboard, and so forth. Cycle there
as if you don’t believe in traffic. Hang a mirror
in the darkest room. The story is going to angle

itself out in instalments. You will see
your features become smudged away,
one by one, and, one by one,
see them repaired. Do this for nine months

and then it’s winter, your lungs burst open
like poinsettias; you, with ribbons on,
in the supermarket, everywhere. People
will think that it’s finished, people sing,

‘you look well!’, people make up
hoops of small talk about the sky.

*

Mary Paterson is a writer and curator based in London (UK). She writes mainly for performance, and her work has been performed around the world including with Live Art DK (Copenhagen), Wellcome Collection (London) & Arnolfini (Bristol). Her poetry has been published by Poetry Magazine, 3am Magazine, & Ambient Receiver, amongst others. Mary is the co-founder of ‘Something Other’: a platform for experimental writing and performance, running since 2014.

Learning Stillness by Robbin Farr

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Learning Stillness

Rereading a friend’s poems,
a gentler time, a time after

my mother’s hospitalizations
for such ailments as trouble

the very old. Yet I am certain
this peace will not last.

Certain restlessness lingers, waits
for the midnight phone to ring,

voice on the other side terse,
anxious with bad news.

Her poems instruct, warn
the wariness of me. Coax me

to learn from the vulnerable
bloodroot that leans into the just

thawing creek to crack open
the bud. Attune my ear

to the water chimes that ring
in this field only. Rest

like the bee asleep in the flower
among the sweet perfume

of its labor. To attend to breath
and song and hum. To stop

searching other worlds
for the inevitable.

*

Robbin Farr writes short form: poetry and brief lyric nonfiction. In addition to writing, she is the editor of River Heron Review poetry journal. Robbin’s work has been published in Cleaver, Citron Review, The MacGuffin, Sky Island and elsewhere. She is the author of two books of poetry, Become Echo (2023) and Transience (2018). She is most happy when revising and submitting. Writing terrifies her. More about Robbin at robbinfarr.com.

Three Poems by Terri Kirby Erickson

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Ballet Class

I tried not to envy the ponytailed waifs
in my ballet class whose ten-year-old bodies
weighed less than dandelions.

I was as thin as they were, but my limbs
were like lead weights compared
to the willow branches of their arms, the bird-

like bones in legs that seemed stronger,
lighter—able to pirouette and plié
with so much ease. At least I make good grades

in school, I’d say to myself while holding
on to the barre like a ship’s mainmast
in a roiling sea. But I knew the ballet teachers

expected better of me—the only daughter
of a Prima Ballerina. It didn’t take long,
however, to see I had none of my mother’s talent.

I would never leap into the air and land like a swan
on the water, dip and sway like a sapling
in the wind. Though I liked wearing the black

leotard and pink tights, my soft, peony-colored
shoes, I couldn’t bend and touch
my toes, let alone twirl on them. So I shed

the ballet slippers and took up writing—
hoping to pen one day, a pirouetting poem,
a pas de chat of words that danced across a page.

*

Woman on the Beach

The woman pacing the rocky beach is no ghost
but a mother whose little boy rose
from his bed and wandered down to the water

while his parents were sleeping. Not quite three,
her only child was red-cheeked and plump
as a baby penguin, with black curls and a winning

smile that made his mother’s heart thump
in her thin chest just to think of it. She knew
he was gone but year after year she rented the same

cottage on the same shore on the same day her boy
disappeared—presumed drowned they said—
and now she is old. Widowed, white-headed

and frail, her body is blown this way and that by
the wind, but still she walks and sometimes
calls his name as if any minute, he’ll come running,

his flushed skin hot against her own cool flesh,
wriggling like a puppy that wants down but she will
not put him down. She will hold him

in her arms and keep him safe like she didn’t do
before, though nothing she says or does
or prays for will ever wake her from a sleep so deep

she never heard his feet hit the floor or the screen
door slam or his cries for help, her beautiful
boy whose mother failed him.

* 

How to Shop with Your Mother

Never make her feel like she’s slowing
you down. Even when she meanders

into the shoe department, running her
hands over the soft leather, admiring

one pair or another for what seems like
forever, you do have time to wait. Then,

when the funeral director tells you they
need clothes for her to wear, a pair of

shoes, you will not open your mother’s
closet door and find, jumbled into a pile,

her worn out sandals, dress shoes with
dented heels, her faded thin-soled flats—

and feel such a wave of sorrow you can’t
catch your breath. You won’t be the one

who hurried her mother along, who kept
on sighing because she was holding you

up when there were so many places you
needed to go and things you needed to do.

*

Terri Kirby Erickson is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry, including Night Talks: New & Selected Poems (Press 53), which was a finalist for (general) poetry in the International Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, including “American Life in Poetry,” Asheville Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, JAMA, Poetry Foundation, Rattle, The SUN, The Writer’s Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and many more. Among her numerous awards are the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, Nautilus Silver Book Award, Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the Annals of Internal Medicine Poetry Prize. She lives in North Carolina.

Three Poems by Abby McCartney

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Self Portrait as Crossword Puzzle

The sign of a beginner is their loyalty
to their first answer. Once you’ve banged
your head against the grid for four
or six months, trying to earn sleep,
you realize: do it in pencil.
Most days I try to pack too many letters
in the same box. Sometimes
that’s allowed – another thing I
had to learn the hard way. I remember
the first time I realized the answer
could spill over the edge, up the sides.
I want the gold star, the answers
clicking into place like a seatbelt.
My favorites, though, are the puzzles
that make their own rules, crossing
YELLOW down with RED across to
make the Orange Bowl. My grandmother
did a Monday crossword every night
before bed, one family pattern
I don’t mind repeating. When she
fought with my mother, it was always
in pen. It’s the work of a lifetime
to learn to erase.

*

Elegy with Summer Rain

The thing about an untimely death is
overnight your recipes became holy.
Your voicemails are relics, your
Cowboys sweatshirt a talisman.
Now I can say your name without
crying. Usually. Sometimes I want
to complain about you as my friends
complain about their mothers:
She never called me, but she assumed
I had been kidnapped if I didn’t call home
by Sunday noon. Sometimes
I want the last book you gave me
to be a book and nothing
more. After the summer storm
the city is bathed in an eerie pink
light, even past sunset, refracting
off the bouldering clouds, making
the bricks glow like jewels,
making everything look wrong.

*

When my mother visits my dreams

When my mother visits my dreams
she wants to know what happened
to all her stuff.
We gave your loaf pans away, I say.
Sorry. Why did you have four of them?
We sent one to my cousin
for their first apartment, I tell her.
She nods. She is glad.

I worry how I will explain the rest:
TikTok, hybrid meetings, Wordle,
The new house my dad lives in
full of a woman she barely knows.
You were gone a long time,
I say.
We didn’t think you were coming back.

I wake and remember
all the things I forgot to ask.

*

Abby McCartney (she/her) is an emerging poet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work explores themes of grief, motherhood, and lineage. She spends her days working on education finance policy at the state and local levels and previously served as an aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is also an active lay leader at Kol Tzedek Synagogue. In her spare time, she enjoys baking, reading, crossword puzzles, and walking her dog around South Philly. She holds an M.P.A. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a B.A. from Yale University, where she was a Truman Scholar.

Idioms by John Amen

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Idioms

My mother loved that saying, the devil’s in the details.
As a kid, I somehow figured that if the devil’s there,
god must be there, too. That would mean, as I saw it,
that the holy & unholy are tucked into the invisible,
playing tug of war or wrestling or high-fiving in the atoms,
in the sprawling fog you find when you
twist & twist that knob on a microscope,
infinite white sea emerging.
I asked my father about it once.
I’m not sure about devils & gods, he said,
that’s more your mother’s department.
Which didn’t tell me much, other than
highlighting the difference between my parents:
my mother who read a poem each morning,
my father who once told me that mythology annoyed him.
What peninsula did they meet on,
waltzing a thin line before veering
to opposite sides of the world,
stamping in their own private tides?
I pray, but I don’t know to whom,
perhaps some cauterized sense of self, a mind removed
from memory & habit. I still dream a small room
where my parents share a kiss & drop their weapons,
my father tossing his boxcutter, my mother her paring knife.
They could both land a cut that didn’t heal easily.
I have the scars from their respective
swipes, & I’m sure my own blade is a cross
between the two: a prop you can dice
logic with, retractable steel you can deny
having used when your lover is bleeding in the sheets.
& speaking of logic, a throatful of proofs
is gathering dust in a bathtub. On the other
side of the house, tomes, magazines never read,
tapped for the yard sale. I’m culling, clearing,
fattening a dumpster that stretches in the backyard,
a black hole oozing its own sensible music.
My parents would be dismayed & proud, they’d
hover over my shoulder, each telling me what I
should keep & discard. These decades later,
I still pace a line between my mother
lost in her galloping verse & my father
muttering over a blueprint. But something,
yes, something writhes in that white streak,
that mist I dive & dive into, groping to find
the silver dollar, the hidden gem. If a god’s there,
so is a devil, & now look, the three of us
splashing like tourists in an empty pool.
Or maybe it’s just me, in the depths, the heights,
alone, thinking the universe is mine.

*

John Amen was a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.

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

Three Poems by Melissa Fite Johnson

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Estranged Villanelle

For forty years, I shared only the good—
my mother and I in a booth every Thursday,
long talks that avoided my childhood

memories. I left out the times she stood,
threatened to walk out, so I’d beg her to stay.
For forty years, I shared only the good—

antiquing in a charming neighborhood,
new bakery, bridal shower, Sunday matinee.
Long talks that pretended my childhood

didn’t color outside the lines of my baby book.
Why did I participate in her little stage play?
For forty years, I shared only the good,

unspoken agreement that some things should
be private. With friends I knew what to say,
long talks that amended my childhood.

Everyone loved my mother. Who would
believe this other side of her, anyway?
So for forty years, I shared only the good,
even with myself. I discounted my childhood.

*

Preexisting Conditions

My brother wouldn’t get the vaccine.
My mother’s partner wouldn’t let her see my brother.
My mother begged my husband and me to fix it.

We tried. Three years of this.

My brother said big pharma.
My mother’s partner uninvited us from his life.
My mother canceled Christmas but still texted

How about a phone call on Christmas to your mother?

I got the text in the car, passenger seat.
I pressed my hand flat against the cold window.
I knew I would never call my mother again.

My husband and I were driving to the zoo,
a pandemic tradition we kept when the world returned.
Every night-disappeared tree now outlined in color,
a reverse silhouette. The familiar made strange.
The sloth’s head on backwards. The owl upside down.

*

Am I the Asshole

I ask my husband, I ask my best friend. They say no.
I say I’m burning it all down. They say I’m cutting the rot.
I say this is a poem and it’s all clichés so far. They say
nothing because now I’m alone, writing this poem.

My mother’s frown. My brother saying I was her little doll.
My classroom ceiling collapsing after reporting a leak for a year.
My mother taught me politeness and quiet. She taught
my brother entitlement and demands. It scares me

how impolite I’m being, not talking to my mother or brother,
quitting my job. Writing this poem. I should smile
and sip tea. I should break cookies into fourths
so it takes half a week to eat one fucking cookie. I should

tell the therapist it’s fine, I don’t remember either.
I should forgive my mother because I should not remember.

*

Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Pleiades, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Melissa, a high school English teacher, is a poetry editor for The Weight, a journal for high school students, and Porcupine Lit, a journal by and for teachers. She and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, KS.

Three Poems by Sayantani Roy

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On the continent of mothering

At twenty-five, I stood in my kitchen
my body still being healed by turmeric-ginger
prescribed by my mother-in-law, continents afar—
boiling milk bottles and nursing guilt over bottled baby food—
listening to my daughter wail in her crib—too proud
to summon her father only a phone call away
even as I felt the great tug of worry that only
a mother can feel.

My daughter is that age now—
an entire length of continent away
on the other coast.

Sometimes, at dead of night, as her father sleeps
I awaken from dreams propelled by
some piece of news I’ve heard earlier
in the day—hearsay or authentic—

and let me tell you this—

I am alone again, in my mother-worry—
always alone on the continent of mothering.

*

Ritual

When it comes to silk sarees, elders advise
against draping them on hangers
or else gravity will pull at the zari
ruining the very ground, the field
that holds everything.
I fold them into neat squares and lay them
on top of each other on almirah shelves—
each stack a stratified rock—each layer
telling its own story. this one the day before
the wedding, this on the first trip back
to my parents’, and this, bought on a whim.
the gray and gold acquired when my taste
shifted to muted tones. and this one I’ve
yet to wear—see the zari darkened from age?
pull this one out, be gentle.
notice the brittle fabric, the deep onion color
that was popular once. how it bears
the strong naphthalene scent of my
mother’s iron chest—unfold with care
or else it might tear along the folds.
twice a year I air them out, refold them
so that the crease lines may breathe.
no crease is ever smoothed away and
old creases get in the way of new ones
like stubborn habits. and sometimes
the silk is willful and refuses to yield.
I fold and refold, coddle and corral. I wonder
how long before any ritual will prove futile.

*

The kitchen, your temple

Vivid, your kitchen, down to the way dust motes swirled
in the ray of slanted afternoon light. The lit triangle of the tablecloth.

The sweetmeat that arrived out of nowhere, which is to say
you made them without fuss. You never urged us to enjoy them

yet your silent yearning took on the curvature of the perfect
mowa and the pristine white of the coconut nadu. In midlife

I find recipes inscribed into your husband’s book of scriptures.
A scrupulous man, not devout, but who thrived on routine.

How he had taken to writing everything in that book towards
the end of his life. Names of five ancestors that preceded him –

all men. Addresses of sons and the one grandson who
became a doctor. Then ingredients started popping in between

odes to the divine. Poppyseeds and bitter melon—
banana blossom and the oddball spice. In your girlish hand

that was never invited to hold a pen. The learned man and his
unschooled wife. Empty vessel he called you once—

the woman who bore him seven children.

*

Sayantani Roy works out of the Seattle area. Her work appears or is forthcoming in several journals, including Alan Squire Publishing, Emerge Literary Journal, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather, Grist, Ruby, TIMBER, West Trestle Review, and Wordgathering. She was a 2024 AWP fiction mentee and was placed as a semifinalist in the 2025 Adroit Journal Anthony Veasna So Scholars in Fiction. She reads poetry for Chestnut Review and Palette Poetry.

Love in People, Not Things by Laura Foley

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Love in People, Not Things

When my mother died, she left behind
few things in her one room
assisted living space.

Some clothes, of course,
and a worn black leather purse.
In it, I discovered,

wrapped in shiny silver paper,
a chocolate, with a message inside,
repeated in five languages,

a fortune candy,
Italian dark chocolate
crisped with hazelnuts, so

I ate it.
Alone in a room emptied of her,
holding almost nothing she owned,

I read and re-read
her last message to me.

*

Laura Foley is the author of, most recently, Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, and Ice Cream for Lunch. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, Common Good Books Poetry Prize, Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award, Bisexual Book Award, and others. Her work has been widely published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, American Life in Poetry, ONE ART, and included in anthologies such as How to Love the World and Poetry of Presence. She holds graduate degrees in Literature from Columbia University, and lives with her wife on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

Photograph

His back to the camera
my father stands at the ocean’s edge.
Hands in his pockets, the flannel lining
thin as the hospital-issue robe
his own father wore over his pajamas.
“Go out to the hallway,”
he was told, “if you’re going to cry.”
Today, a moth stirs the air
near the dogwood. Circling and reversing.
Searching for more than is there.
The unopened leaf buds like half-said things.
At what edge does my father now stand?

*

On Suffering

Studying my reflection in the blossoming plums
I stumbled and fell.
My mother, who could never forgive my beauty
leaned over the examination table.
“Now you know how it feels,” she said.
It meaning life, I supposed.
The nurse gave me a tender look, her face radiant
with the world’s pain. A shoulder blade
was eased back into place.
Gravel removed with a surgical blade.
I imagined myself as the rock before it was crushed
and made into pavement. This was consolation.
I sensed all my troubles dropping away.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/

Don’t Say You Never Knew Him by Paula R. Hilton

~ ONE ART ~ 8 Comments

Don’t Say You Never Knew Him

I was 27 when my mother pressed
her wedding band into my hand.
I’m so angry. I don’t want it.
Startled by venom in her voice,
I took it but told her I had no idea
what to do with it. Melt it down,
sell it, give it away. I don’t care.

Dad had dementia but hid his condition.
The man people flocked to for financial
advice died with the trunk of his Ford
stuffed with unpaid bills. Mom screamed
like a wounded animal. He’d bankrupted us.

A decade later, her memories soften.
Tells me Dad had been a great kisser.
He made my ears burn. She also shares
some advice. Don’t say you never knew him.
Say you didn’t know the extent of his illness.

I go to my room. Pull her band from
the jewelry box where it’s waited for
3,650 days, ask her if she wants it back.
She takes the gold ring from my open
palm. Slips it back on. Yes, she says, I do.

*

Paula R. Hilton explores the immediacy of memory and how our most important relationships define us. Her work has appeared in The Sunlight Press, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Feminine Collective, The Tulane Review, and many others. Her poetry collection, At Any Given Second, was selected by Kirkus as one of its best books of 2021. She earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Learn more at https://paularhilton.com

Cruel Spring by Tamara Madison

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Cruel Spring

My child calls to tell me a horror story,
a scene she’s just witnessed in her backyard
beneath the Bradford pear where, last week
her dog found a nest of newborn rabbits.
Before she could stop it, the pug
snatched one tiny life and shook it dead.
But that was already a week’s old tale.

Today’s story involves a crow. She saw it
fling a small thing into the air, then poke it
with its beak where it landed. Then it took off
with the thing in its talons. The mother rabbit
was left there under the tree, hopping around
in despair and disbelief. My daughter had
to tell me this.

Oh, bunny my bunny! Sometimes
I can hardly bear my own good fortune.

*

Tamara Madison is the author of three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic”, “Moraine” (both from Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar” (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and two chapbooks, “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig, Worcester Review, ONE ART, and many other publications. More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Lost by Ashley Kirkland

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Lost

I’ve lost my mother many times, enough
to fill a lifetime. She is always slipping away
from me. The first time (a classic) in a 90’s turn of events

in a department store, I pressed my face to soft silk shirts
& got lost in a rack of clothing. A woman found me crying
in the center of the circular rack. Years later, we nearly lost

her when her heart blew open in the living room,
her aorta fraying like the end of a rope. The ghost I was floated
across campus for weeks. A teacher called me honey

and I nearly cried: nearly motherless at 21. Now, 36,
my husband and I talk in the kitchen on a Sunday
afternoon, rain drizzling in late November, football helmets

clashing on the tv in the other room, and we talk about her
health as if it concerns us and I say he’ll be devastated,
referring to our older son, who loves my mother. She doesn’t realize

I say who she’s hurting by not taking care of herself as if her health
is something within our control. I was 21 & I said goodbye to her
over the phone and drove home while she was in surgery,

her chest splayed open on the operating table, her aorta
a patchwork. Now, 36, I stop and listen every time I hear sirens
to see if they turn in the direction of her street. I lose her again

and again, dread the day when I get the call (again),
when my father tells me to come home now, and I have to tell
my son, in words I don’t yet know, what has happened.

*

Ashley Kirkland writes in Ohio where she lives with her husband and sons. Her work can be found in Cordella Press, Boats Against the Current, The Citron Review, Naugatuck River Review, HAD, Major7thMagazine, among others. Her chapbook, BRUISED MOTHER, is available from Boats Against the Current. She is a poetry editor for 3Elements Literary Review. You can find her at lashleykirkland.bsky.social and lashleykirklandwriter on Instagram.

Letter to My Son, Over Three Years Since He’s Gone by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

~ ONE ART ~ 18 Comments

Letter to My Son, Over Three Years Since He’s Gone

You would be jealous, I think,
of how your sister is learning trig,
speaking Spanish, playing bridge.
You’d probably tease her, but really,
what you’d be thinking is, She is so cool.
And she is, sweetheart. She’s fun
and silly. Like you. Only like her.
We talk about you, of course.
Just this weekend, we remembered
how once you said if a 99-pound person
ate a one-pound burger, they
would be one percent burger.
I wonder what percent of your sister
is grief? And what percentage love?
Tonight a girl asked her if she had any siblings.
She said, yes, a brother. When the girl
asked her how old you were, she told her
the truth. That you were seventeen
when you died. What a terrible gift
to learn how to say the hardest things straight.
I can’t help but think if you are watching her,
you, too, must be in awe of who she’s becoming.
Oh, how we learn to grow from whatever soil
we’ve been given. I do not pretend to know
how this works. I only know she
is learning to transform ache into beauty,
nightmare into dream. I only know
I long for her to know love from you
the way a garden feels loved by sun, by rain.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is poet laureate for Evermore. She co-hosts the Emerging Form podcast. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her newest collection is The Unfolding. One-word mantra: Adjust.

I Had Such Complicated Feelings About My Mother’s Body by Tarn Wilson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment
I Had Such Complicated Feelings About My Mother’s Body
I had such complicated feelings about my mother’s body.
So much softness and self-hatred, but I liked her collar bone.
Her collar bone is the only jewelry she left me, the statement
necklace I wear just under my skin, so pronounced it collects
pools of water that could hold icy jewels or little fish.
Clavicle. The only large vertical bone in our bodies. A hanger
on which to balance our head and dangle the rest. The first bone,
in the womb, to begin to ossify; the last to finish, early twenties.
In my early twenties my newly-finished collar bone was an elegant
curve. Now my skin is a rumbled suit and my collar bone whispers
too loudly of skeletons. In the end, my mother was mostly bone,
and in that hollowed shape I could see every face she’d ever had.
A montage that shifted as she turned her head. You can only
love a body that has so little left, that has worked so hard to live.
I’ve never feared skeletons, maybe because I’m in love with form.
The shapes of leaves. The architecture of dogs. The silhouette
of trees. The intricacies of animal feet. My soft and hard, wild
and difficult mother knew little of the structures children need.
She was always changing: her job, her city, her story, her beliefs,
who it was this week she hated most until there was no one left
to hate. But there it was: her essential shape–with me always
–smaller than I would have guessed–and braver.
*
Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (Wandering Aengus Book Award), and a craft book: 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. Her essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Harvard Divinity Bulletin, River Teeth, and The Sun. She is currently taking a break from her long-term relationship with prose and has been shamelessly flirting with poetry. New work appears in Grey Matter, Imagist, Museum of Americana, One Sentence Poems, Pedestal, Porcupine Literary, New Verse News, Right Hand Pointing, and Sweet Lit and is forthcoming in Only Poems and Potomac Review.

To a Mother I Know by Alison Luterman

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

To a Mother I Know

I have seen you lift
the whole car of your pain
and hold it above your head
with trembling arms.

Seen you bench-press
that two-ton rusted hulk aloft
for eighteen years
so that your daughter

could play in the open air
creating whole worlds, innocent
of the superhuman effort
you were making

to keep the weight
off her. It happens all the time,
mothers do this, they hoist
the unbearable and they bear it,

but witnessing you achieve
the impossible, breaks
something in me. Not
my heart, but the ice sheath

around it. I think
of my own mother, of course,
and how valiant her effort
at keeping me apart

from her suffering, though you can’t
really keep a daughter apart,
we are too much entwined
in one long umbilicus

reaching down
the generations like tree vines.
And this is what’s
the matter, mater, mother

of all truths: the weight
of what we try to carry
for each other will never
be fully known.

*

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

On Mom’s 75th Birthday by Brian Dickson

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On Mom’s 75th Birthday

Her ghost didn’t show up
this time like other nights

after her death.
I’m sure we

would’ve played Taboo or
Guesstures, watched

her race
to the bathroom from

hard laughter.
Later, one last story:

when her shed with her kids’
and her childhood caught

fire—papers—wide-lined,
gray, filled with words

we were practicing back
then, the wind lifting

the U’s, S’s, E pluses,
S minuses—nothing

left but my sister’s
bronzed baby shoes

searing our grass, trailing
those burnt letters.

*

When not teaching at the Community College of Denver, Brian Dickson avoids driving as much as possible to connect with the quotidian and sacred around him, hang, and shoot hoops. He is also an associate editor of New Feathers Anthology. Past publications include two chapbooks, In a Heart’s Rut (HighFive press), Maybe This is How Tides Work (Finishing Line Press), one book, All Points Radiant (WordTech, Cherry Grove Editions), and various journals. He has a forthcoming chapbook from Finishing Line Press, A Child’s Sketch of the Afterlife, arriving later in 2025. You can find him on Instragram @brihamwrites.

Four Poems by Robbi Nester

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Grass

That spring, my parents were trying to mend the lawn,
all crabgrass, wild garlic, and dandelion, tangled stalks
that came up on their own. The neighbors had complained,
saying that our lawn made the block seem shabby,
attracted rats. I helped my father choose from a catalog,
containing bluegrass, fescue, rye. He chose Zoysia, hoping
it would, as promised, reduce the need for weeding, but he
never weeded, loving whatever came up, whether from
scattered seeds or slips of root or of unknown origin.
He didn’t know that much about his ancestors, but you
could tell he came from farmers by the way he held each
seedling, tucked it into the ground. I watched the workmen
roll out the new green lawn, like an ancient tapestry, roots
dangling in loose threads below each heavy strip. Still,
what was underneath thrived—those twisted stems,
hardy and resilient—like the past you know and the one
you don’t, neither of which will ever go away.

*

In my memory my mother speaks again

about the loquat tree that grew outside her window
in Capetown, at the very tip of Africa. She wanted me
to spread the seeds of her lost life, to make them grow.
She fed me all the fruits she used to know, the alligator pear
(AKA the avocado). She would breakfast daily on it, and
in season, pomegranates, bright with ruby seeds, bursting
like a hive. She was Persephone, at least in her own mind,
dragged to the underworld by that dark man, my father.

*

Traces

It’s been two decades since I’ve been in my old neighborhood,
once the haunt of Jewish families not quite middle class.
They built a quasi-suburban enclave, with schools and shops
and synagogues, a library, public transportation, even its own
newspaper. When we moved in, the ground was raw, unplanted.
I remember stores opening on Castor Ave: the Gingham House,
where everybody’s mom shmoozed with groups of friends, the delis
and the kosher bakeries, two movie theaters. Gone, the last time
I was there, to empty out my parents’ house and sell it. Was I still
the child netting fireflies in the high grass, riding my bike around
the block? I didn’t recognize any of the people. Where was
Mr. Moskewitz, the blind man, with his guide dog? The kind librarian?
The trolley, shooting sparks as it jolted down the track? Gutted.
In their place, empty storefronts, overflowing garbage cans.

*

Explorer

In 1980, I came to California as a transplant, stunned
by the brightness, spiky palm trees, brown hills.
It surprised me that everything came from somewhere else,
like me, exotic backdrop to some movie scene I could not
identify. Busloads of gawking tourists, squawking parrots,
escapees, in motley flocks, picking dark fruits from the
olive trees, bright lemons. So much to see—the blue of sky
and sea. White line of beach, offering an opportunity to fill
each space with words, to take root in the arid soil and grow,
set seed among orange groves, twisted eucalyptus, The desert,
which reminded me of an abandoned parking lot, with its
tumbleweed and Joshua trees, starved moon. But California
had another face, a place of redwood and sequoias. Standing
in their damp half-light, I became a child again, distracted
by the distant sky’s bright mirror, the sun’s familiar face.
Now I’ve settled in, my explorations mostly limited to plate
and page, I’m still trying new ideas, cuisines, sniffing spices
at the Farmer’s market, taking on a shape I didn’t have before.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry and editor of three anthologies. She is a retired college educator and elected member of the Academy of American Poets. Her website is at RobbiNester.net

Two Poems by Melissa Surrette

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Walking a chair home from the Clark Community Thrift Store

One hypotenuse across
the Saint Peter’s parking lot
was the trip from our apartment
to the thrift store that once
was Monihan’s Pharmacy.
“Have you seen that chair
they have over there?”
My dad swooned on our
trip a few blocks beyond
to Tedeschi’s market
“I’m gonna ask to sit in it.”

Dad oscillates from his couch-
made-bed to a cracked dining
chair to watch the news.
In secondhand socks and shoes,
he skips at the sight of
weighty wooden
slabs for arms (3ft. x 3ft)
sandwiching slightly scratchy cushions,
bistre brown—color of my hair.
Dad’s perfection, kept at bay
“If only I had forty bucks,” he’d say.

“How much do you have?”
Danielle asks.
“I’ll do twenty-five,
if you do fifteen.”

Comfy chair, but more so
comforting to fulfill
Dad’s humble indulgence.
Two teens with summer
jobs and City money.
A flutter from diaphragm
to the back of my nose
when I imagine him in
a tweed-upholstered throne.

“I need a break,”
I sigh to Danielle
and rub blood back into
my throbbing fingers
a few parking spaces
from the sidewalk.

“Twenty bucks and I’ll take
that anywhere you want,”
says a truck driver on Main street.
We wave him off,
pick up our cargo.

“You go girls!” from the woman
who sits at the bus stop, but
never boards. She watches
us shuffle down a mulched slope
and past three doorways.

“For me?” asks my dad
as he helps us labor
down landing stairs
his considerable chair.

*

Two-player Rummy with Mom

A deck split in half
a riffle shuffle
a bridging back together.

Soap opera marathon on
The bureau mounted TV. Mountain
Dew bottle sits on the plastic
tote bucket made side table

to Mom’s king size bed set:
two twin box springs under a
mattress for one.
On her bed, she sits sidesaddle.

I sit on my left ankle. Right leg
dangles, not yet long enough
to touch the rose and cream
rug. Seven cards dealt per person

on Merlot sheets pulled
and tucked taut between
my knee and where she sits
facing me.

Her Five-Star spiral notebook
sits open beside us. She keeps
score between neat lists in
blue ink, strickenthrough to-dos:

Laundromat: Four basketball
jerseys for this week’s game
Family physicals: 3 youngest Thursday,
4 middles Friday.
Food pantry Wednesday:
Request Parmalat milk.
Cash Welfare checks: Stop
by housing authority afterward

*

Originally from Worcester, Massachusetts, Melissa Surrette is currently a PhD student at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities) engaging in and researching teacher education. Before that, she earned her Master of Arts in Teaching at Clark University in Worcester, MA. She has contributed chapters to edited volumes such as Qualitative Inquiry in the Present Tense: Writing a New History and in the Demystifying Social Justice Education book series. Melissa has also co-authored a forthcoming article in the “International Review of Qualitative Research”. Melissa is a member of the Poem Works poetry group as well as the Round Table Poetry Workshop.

Admission by Livia Meneghin

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Admission

The mourning doves returned this May. Despite
last summer’s shooing & ammonium poured

onto the terrace floor. Despite a ramshackle
bicycle as the only shelter to roost beneath.

They first came the year our home was vacated.
I went north. My sister went south. My mother,

away in her own way, tended to her dying
parents a ten minute drive down the Bronx River.

I admit, I was angry with my mother for leaving
our apartment. The words taste of guilt

because so had I. She chose to stay in her
childhood home instead—where her parents,

one at a time, over countless sleepless nights
& all the love a daughter could give, left her.

When my mother returned, the doves joined her,
knowing she would admit them a nest. Now,

two eggs await life in a shallow swirl of twigs
& dry leaves. We, her daughters, build lives

elsewhere, slowly learn to give her permission
to grieve how she needs, & imagine—

she does not wish to disturb the birds
on the terrace, so she looks out the window, hoping

they will come into view.

*

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Reads Editor. She has won fellowships and awards from Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, the Writers’ Room of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA, she teaches college literature and writing. She is a cancer survivor.

Dear Daughter, by Julie Weiss

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Dear Daughter,

I see you in the store, rummaging
through a display of tacky hibiscus
hairclips, our town´s new fad
among fourth graders. You ask me
which color bedazzles above
all the rest. I was nine once, too.
I know you want to buy the one
that will garner the most compliments
on the playground, or a nod from a girl
who swatted you out of her path
like a delirious September wasp.
I know the stings you´ll bring home
again and again, deem unbearable.
I see you, shushing me when I speak
too loudly in the language everyone
in Spain is trying to learn. Tweaking
your American accent in English class
to sound like your friends. I know
all the gifts you´ll toss in your closet,
the smile you´ll wipe off your cheeks
like a ruby red lipstick print
when I drop you off half a block
from the school gate. At your age
I, too, tried on seven different attitudes
a week, all of them as becoming
as an elephant beetle. I see the gluten-thick
birthday cakes you can´t taste,
the gapes when you mention your two
moms. I know how you regard your
differences—a weird gang of gargoyles
marring an otherwise beautiful garden.
I want to shout, “You´re wrong!”
Dear daughter, slam the fads
on the counter and tornado away. Wild
your hair into a style that will drop
this decade´s jaw. Catwalk through town
in a hodgepodge, expletives be damned.
Cartwheel past the gatekeepers like
a carnival act. Learn the word for perfection
in 7000 different languages.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. Her work appears in Chestnut Review, ONE ART, Rust + Moth, and Sky Island Journal, among others. Originally from California, she lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.

Three Poems by Jane Edna Mohler

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Rare Beasts

The surface is broken
by my boat,
the hard heads
of turtles, fish stretching
their limits,
and dead branches
that have nothing left to defend.
Then a snake.
I understand
those better-safe-
than-sorry turtles leaping
from their logs; curious carp
that briefly visit our dimension.
But this snake,
this nonchalant
swimmer with such composure
decides that I’m
of no concern.
Yet my heart pounds,
as when holding my breath
for scans of my organs,
or listening for what to expect
while counting backwards.
So when do I get
that devil-may-care spirit,
the glassy eyes
of that scarce species that never worries?
Maybe that snake’s heart
beat a little too fast
when he saw me coming.
And why do I hope that’s true?
Our kind
is always crashing
in the calm between two thorned
shores: the threat
we feel or the threat we are.
I raised my paddle high.

*

Ornithology Lessons

I.

My yard ripples
with blue jays, a throng
of little tyrannosaurs

screeching and shuffling
seed. Before consulting
Peterson’s, I offered

apple and peach parings.
All spurned. Now I know
those jays want berries.

Is it a trivial thing to learn
what pleases
another?

II.

Whenever Mother deemed
some effort worthless,
she’d wave an arm and say,

That’s for the birds.
With no propensity for parenting,
cowbirds leave their eggs

to the care of others. Yet
how those fledglings
strut, it’s all

sweet feed
and what’s right
now.

* 

She’s Always Hungry

Winter arrives with the blank
face of a runway model, languid

and sheer as the chiffon scarf
that drifts across her shoulders.

Bored by the heat of living,
she abhors the goo and mess.

Old German named her
the time of water.

She makes my lake crack
and groan. That crisp

look she gives, so alluring
you’ll ignore the chilly

clues of flat infatuation.
You don’t stand a chance.

An empty retreat that never serves
meals; she wants us to learn

the difference between hunger
and greed. Praise the rare blue sky,

the weak brushstrokes of charcoal
trees, but don’t fall for those sharp

bones that grin from under
her waxen skin. Prepare

a bed of crocuses, anxious
to spring from her grave.

* 

Jane Edna Mohler is the 2020 Bucks County Poet Laureate (Pennsylvania). Recent publications include MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Verse News, and Verse Virtual. Her collection, Broken Umbrellas was published by Kelsay (2019). She is Poetry Editor of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. www.janeednamohler.com

Two Poems by Heidi Seaborn

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

I’ve Been Thinking About Love

as I read the news
gunning its engine

as it muscles
over the streets at night

as my neighbor tends
the rare rose of four percent
remission hope

as her wife touches
the belly of her cancer
and considers death—

as the soft sand of land
beneath our homes
slowly erodes.

Yes, I’ve been thinking
how love arrives like a bird
then becomes

a burden—
difficult to hold,
impossible to let go. Yet

as the world howls,
it is the bird I hear.

*

On the September Day I Help My Mother Move into Senior Living

Am I too quick? The days already foreshortened.
A glass of rosé passé.

We unwrap each plate, goblet, tureen—
a final shelving.

Yet, a vase of dahlias—.
Light traces the rooms

we sift through like memories.
The gleaming silver tea set—

heirloom doomed for crucible and torch.
I lift a file box marked IMPORTANT.

For when I die you say—
I place it beyond

reach. Then fold the linens,
make the bed, carry the empty boxes

out into a tarnished evening—
returning to the shimmer of you.

*

Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in Poetry. She’s the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Agni, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times of London, Poetry Northwest, Plume, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi degrees from Stanford and NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com

The Muse Commands by Tamara Madison

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Muse Commands

We stop at the end of the pier,
where the full moon spreads its path
across the sea. Our little son gasps
at the sight, claps his hands, looks up at us
and says in a voice that is like a swoon
I want to draw that! I have to draw that now!

I know the feeling. We hurry to the market
before it closes, buy the only art supplies there.
Back at the hotel he sets to work, pink tongue
peeking from the corner of his mouth.
But crayons and rough paper are not enough
to capture his sense of it, the way the moon
stroked the water like a mother.

And I remember the time my brother
found me writing and insisted I share
my poem with him. Who could be closer
to you than me, your own brother?
Because he was older, I handed it over.
He read it silently, then left the room.
I read it again, but the feeling was gone.

*

Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbooks “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press), and three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine” (Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar (Sheila-Na-Gig). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, the Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, One Art, the Writer’s Almanac and many other publications. A swimmer, dog lover and native of the southern California desert, she has recently retired from teaching English and French in a Los Angeles high school. Read more about her at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Two Poems by Shannon Frost Greenstein

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments
Your Hands
When you play music for me, I watch
the nimble joints of your practiced fingers
curl over the faded piano keys
like diaphanous wings unfolding in the heat of sunrise
and I feel something I did not feel before.
You play a chord and I see
a web developer, fabricating a brand-new reality
from a Lego pile of ones and zeroes; and
a surgeon, hands holding mastery
over the cellular processes of life itself; and
God, mixing the soundtrack of the cosmos
like a DJ high on bass and MDMA.
When you play music for me, your wrists
dance like Baryshnikov between sharps and flats and perfect fifths,
percussion as choreography as language as song,
and as your entire body resonates with music you yourself have scripted
I remember what it was like to fall in love with you.
You write me a song and I reflect
on tempo and poetry and heartbeat and joy, the privilege of immortality
captured in something beautiful and heretofore unknown –
art that exists where art previously did not exist,
a Big Bang birthing matter from the seeds of nothing at all –
and everything because I was lucky enough to meet a musician and my soulmate
one summer night at a bar.
When you play music for me, I forget all about how
I used to yearn for the touch of tragic artists
who sow the sort of lust and mystery
I would later reap as heartbreak
and instead picture the silk of your palms against the landscape of my naked back
as you soothe my restless body when I am unable to sleep.
You compose and I watch your fingertips
sculpting notes into paths and layers and staircases and peaks,
thousands of hours of work culminating in this very moment and,
in an act of primal validation orchestrated by Darwin himself,
a rush of neurotransmitters through my blood affirms my choice
that this is indeed the mate to father my young.
When you play music for me, I cannot look away
from your hands.
*
She Gave Me Her Last Diet Coke
I blame my mother, of course,
for conceiving
and birthing
my own addiction to Diet Coke.
They say eating disorders are a family disease;
they say an eating disorder is like a gun.
The pistol is the genetic predisposition
to seek out control when things feel uncontrollable;
the bullet is a culture that venerates thin
and praises the anesthetic of becoming less.
The trigger is unbearable anxiety or distress,
so is it any wonder that childhood trauma leads to eating disorders?
Screwed by both nature and nurture,
my mother’s eating disorder was planted in my genome
before I even had a say.
Ballet and abuse and mental illness and assault
germinated my Anorexia by the time I was eight.
And the rest of my life has been spent
grappling with the one firearm
I never wanted to fire.
They say recovery from an eating disorder can take over a decade;
they say maybe it isn’t even possible to recover at all.
After three decades of punishing myself
for requiring the fuel of food
I still don’t know if I will ever be free
from the voices that inform me I am worthless
deep within the bowels of my broken brain.
For years I have worked, and cried,
and done my best to get where I am today.
But my Diet Coke addiction remains a vestigial artifact
of the times it would take two twenty-ounce bottles
just to quench my hunger.
I eventually forgave my mother
for loading the gun that became my cross to bear;
after a lifetime of estrangement,
she was finally my friend
by the time she passed last November.
And I know she loved me
because the last time I saw her before she died
she gave me her last Diet Coke.
*
Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of “Only as Sick as Your Secrets: Notes from Residential Eating Disorder Treatment,” a forthcoming memoir with Watertower Hill Press, “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a novelette with Emerge Literary Press, and “Pray for Us Sinners,” a collection of short fiction from Alien Buddha Press. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee, with work in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks

My Mother Could Write Lines for Fortune Cookies by Barbara Krasner

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

My Mother Could Write Lines for Fortune Cookies

Your father may think you’re a genius.
I know you’re not. #77

You have many outfits that make you look thinner.
What you’re wearing now isn’t one of them. #206

Dye your hair. Go much lighter. #95

You don’t make any mistakes,
but marrying the village idiot?
That was a lollapalooza. #89

Only you have the strength
to withstand divorce. #91a

Only you have the strength
to raise a toddler on your own. #91b

You need more color.
Wear make-up. #86

Dying people always reach
out for their mamas.
You will too. #208

*

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the author of three novels in verse for young readers. Her work has also appeared in Nimrod, Michigan Quarterly Review, Consequence Forum, The Ekphrastic Review, Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.

March Birthday by Jeanne Griggs

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

March Birthday

I knew it was your birthday
as soon as I woke
so I told your father,
called your grandparents to come,
took your sister out with a friend,
packed my bag and smoothed the sheet
on the bassinet, ready for you.
All these years later I still wake
knowing it’s your birthday. I sent
a cake and a text
because you don’t know
how you’re still part
of the circulation of my blood,
your fetal cells still in my marrow,
and that the thought of you
is like sunshine on the forsythia
outside my bedroom window,
the same twigs suddenly showing
blooms as on that first morning.

*

Jeanne Griggs is a Pushcart nominated poet; her poems have appeared in the Mid-Atlantic Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Inquisitive Eater, Thimble Literary Magazine and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Jeanne is the author of Postcard Poems (Broadstone Books).

Two Poems by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

MY MOTHER’S NAME

Two days before the last, after
the seizure had rearranged
my mother’s bearings,
I sat beside her while
the young dark-haired nurse
fluffed her pillow, measured her pulse,
offered to apply
my mother’s signature lipstick,
the Revlon Hot Coral we both loved.
I listened as the nurse asked my mother
to say her name out loud,
and in a gravelly almost-whisper my mother
chose Penny Kosmos—her maiden name
spoken so readily as if she were already
winding back to her beginnings
without us, before me
or my sister, before my father,
back to her girlhood
even to the origin of space
and time, of a world
that so loved her in it.

*

FOR MY COLLEGE BOYFRIEND KILLED IN A PRIVATE PLANE CRASH AT AGE TWENTY-NINE

I see you tall and handsome still,
chestnut hair cut extra short
for your Navy duties those last years.
From the photo you sent me, I noted
a hairline receding just a little;
I like to think you’d eventually be balding
as your tall, professorial father was bald.
I like to think of you again, as my own still-long hair
thins and loses some dark sheen; I like to think of you
as one of us now—some added weight around the middle
perhaps, lines around the eyes and the mouth that maps
a generous life—an older man who once loved so well
an insecure girl-woman of nineteen whose long dark hair
whirled delightfully in the air while you drove her around the city
in your dashing red convertible.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of seven full-length poetry collections, most recently Her Joy Becomes from Fernwood Press and Marrow of Summer from Kelsay Books. A new collection from Fernwood entitled Belonging Songs will be published in 2025. New poems are forthcoming in Women Artists’ Datebook 2025, The Healing Muse, Braided Way, Delta Poetry Review, Midwest Quarterly, and the Paterson Literary Review.

Two Poems by Mary Lou Buschi

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Fire

            After Marianne Moore

Burned you didn’t it, my mother used to say.
Nowhere near a stove or flame but the accusation
hung there, in the air like refraction waves.
Burned you, you who should have known better.
You who stuffed a short skirt, two panties
in your purse after tracing Kit Fever, not your name
on a frequent flyer ticket. You who barely flew – came
the minute he said so.
No phone, no media, no way to track
the Landcruiser bouncing
over the Grand Tetons. Burned you.
Once. Twice. Shame on you.
Love, was it? Girl alone on a barstool at the Gaslight Saloon.
A dog with three legs curled under the rungs.

*

To the Ninth Grade Girl Crying in the Nurse’s Office During Lunch

You will be invisible in your 50s. Cheese will always be delicious. One day you will drive past a row of trees and name them: Sumac, Walnut, Tulip, and know which ones are invasive. You will become concerned with all things invasive as you stare out the window at a yard too large for your diminishing energy. People will be less interesting, but you will love more of them than you ever thought you could, deeply, finding flaws that enact that velvet kind of love that softens your eyes and warms the curves of your ears. Let–it–go. All of it. Not much matters. Not the stop sign you hit during your driving test. Not the Great Lash you lifted in middle school, or the date you ditched at Lucky Strike. Not the way you organize your closet by color, bookshelves by imagined dinner parties. It all gets left behind for someone to sort. It may be an unassuming couple that throws what you held dear into a rented dumpster. Dear Ninth Grade Girl, you will try to step off this world many times. Many times, I hope you fail.

*

Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) is the author of 3 chapbooks and 3 full length poetry collections. Her 3rd book, BLUE PHYSICS was published in February 2024. (Lily Poetry Review books). PADDOCK, her second book was also published by (LPR). Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Willow Springs, On the Seawall, among many others. Mary Lou is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and holds an MS in Urban Education from Mercy University. Currently, she is a special education teacher working with students on the spectrum in the Bronx.

Two Poems by Elizabeth S. Wolf

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Shattered

Coming home from college,
crouched down on the kitchen floor,
she wouldn’t couldn’t look me in the eye
she wouldn’t couldn’t tell me why
her blanket was a tangled bundle stained with vomit
but I knew, a woman knows, a mother doesn’t want to
so I asked, did someone try to hurt you and then
said what I really meant, did someone try to rape you
and she nodded, head averted looking down
         he was choking me
                  but it stopped when I threw up
and she whispered no one believed and Andi
blamed me for ruining her goodbye party and I
guess I had it coming since I was just starting to
feel kind of good about myself and I felt pretty
and I was having fun and I guess I went too far
and a mother’s heart sinks
bile rising up your throat
because this shouldn’t still be happening
and I know that late-teen type of cocky
that heady joy of looking good
that tastes almost like tossing back
a shot of pure verve— that rush
of coming into your own self—
a righteous confidence that
never comes back the same
once the spell is broken.

* 

At Seventeen

I borrowed my mother’s car, a cherry red Buick Skylark
circa 1971. It was the first anniversary of my father’s death
but instead of demurely lighting a Yahrzeit candle I took off
to see a boy, a hot boy, a rad boy, a bit-of-a-dangerous
bad boy, who was staying with friends; we had all scattered
when the halfway house for troubled teens suddenly totally
closed. We met up and headed out into a steamy summer night.
He broke into a stacked rack of mailboxes, looking for checks;
broke into a holy Catholic church, seeking silver and gold;
broke into me, brusque with lust; recklessly ran a red light
and smashed the car, high-style bumper and driver-side doors
dented and scratched, stolid white upholstery stained by
splotches of blood. I waited for sunrise to return the keys;
my mother rolled over in her empty bed and asked me to
leave. Later the doctor stitching me up would laugh:
Tell your boyfriend to be more careful next time.
For years after I lit a commemorative candle, a tall taper
stuck in the graceful green neck of an empty bottle, dripping
wax melting and merging, colors converging, layers emerging
year after year like the rings of a tree, latewood circling
spring growth, rising high above riddles of sealing or healing.

*

Elizabeth S. Wolf has published 5 books of poetry, most recently I Am From: Voices from the Mako House in Ghana (2023). Her chapbook Did You Know? was a Rattle prizewinner. Rattle Summer 2022 featured her project with Prisoner Express. In 2023 Elizabeth taped readings at the White House, Supreme Court, and US Capitol with The Scheherazade Project. In 2024 her work landed on the moon with the Lunar Codex. Learn more at https://www.amazon.com/author/esw

Three Poems by Michelle Meyer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

We Were Just Getting to Know Each Other

And then you died.
It was September. When I saw you
in April we put on your dresses,
adorned our bare necks
with your handmade scarves
and drove, windows down,
to a concert.
Before we left
I took your picture.
You were seated
in the dining room
looking out the window,
face turned, legs crossed,
the sun, a halo
circling your body.
There was one photo that you liked
best. In it, your image was blurred,
hazy around the edges, faint
as your ghost.

*

The Way It Is

I’m running. It’s the anniversary
of my mother’s death
and I’m a few miles out when I stop
to take in the view.
Somewhere I hear a rooster crowing
and somewhere else a siren
is wailing.

My Grandma used to smoke Marlboro’s,
drink Manhattan’s and say,
That’s the way it is. A lazy answer
to her bruises, the world’s bruises,
but then again, she could only bear to live
in the moment and in those moments
she wasn’t wrong.

I run further, see a purple morning glory
blooming near a discarded styrofoam cup,
an overstory of green shimmering
above an understory of brown.
There is a visible line
where the chemicals end, where life hovers
above death.

Everything is straddling some kind of line.

Mom is dead. Grandma is dead.
The tiny, nearly translucent spider
that I squashed with the tip of my thumb
is dead.
I had no right.
I am full of shame
but that’s the way it is.

* 

The Question of Whether or Not We Should Sell Our House

One day it feels like we should
and the next day it feels like we shouldn’t.
We speak of the pros and cons,
but logic has never lived here.
This is a place of romance and charm
say all of the eager realtors
whose calls we never return.
My dark-haired ambition has gone gray.
I’ve lost control
of two out of the five flower gardens.
It’s your prairie, says a friend,
and I remember how the goldenrod bloomed
at our wedding. My anxiety wilts.
I’m the only one who can see it
turning to seed, drifting away,
replanting itself in a daydream.
The one where I am sitting by a lake,
reading a book and all the sailboats
are unmoored.

*

Michelle Meyer is the author of The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child (2024, Cornerstone Press) and The Book of She (2021), a collection of persona poems devoted to women. Recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Humana Obscura, Remington Review, Under Her Eye: A Blackspot Books Anthology, and Welter among others. She is one of those people who loves kale.

The Only Photo by Arvilla Fee

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

The Only Photo

There’s a picture of me and my mother
I mean, technically, you can’t see me,

although you can see the outline of my form
curled as I was in utero;

but my mother—you can clearly see,
tall, legs like a giraffe, standing on the front porch

near a trellis of plump red roses, dressed in a t-shirt
and shorts; she has a sprinkle of freckles on her nose,

(which I inherited) and long strawberry-blonde hair;
her hand is tented across her forehead, shading

her gray-green eyes from the glare of the sun, and
she’s grinning like a cat who swallowed the canary—

perhaps because my father told one of his pre-dad
jokes—or perhaps because she was still snickering

about putting a plastic snake beside his coffee cup
(a story my dad has told me a thousand times),

or perhaps her sunlit smile was because she knew
I would push my way into the world in just one week;

but no one could know, of course, least of all her,
this would be the only picture I’d ever have of us.

*

Arvilla Fee lives in Dayton, Ohio, teaches English, and is the managing editor for The San Antonio Review. She has had poems, photography, and short stories published in Mudlark, North of Oxford, Drifting Sands Haibun, Triggerfish Critical Review, Cholla Needles, Havik, October Hill Magazine and many other presses. Her poetry books, The Human Side and This is Life can be found on Amazon. To learn more, visit Arvilla’s website.

HOW TO BECOME A MOTHER WHILE FALLING OFF A BUILDING by Carlin Katz

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

HOW TO BECOME A MOTHER WHILE FALLING OFF A BUILDING

Accept that you are both falling. Understand neither of you will survive. Spit out the sweetness of your life. Hold his head against your breast. Remember when he was pulled from under your ribs. Recall the gasp—the wide-eyed uncoupling of what was once whole. Feel the cold air strip you of your selfishness. Rotate your body so you will go first. Hold him above your head, your heart. Hold him away from the ground which is coming closer and closer. Preserve him, as long as you can. Now, imagine him without a mother, if even for a split second. Feel the unforgivable lurch of that. Refuse to abandon him. Twist your body again, more difficult this time against so much gravity, so that he lands first. Be willing to endure this loss. Smile at him. Let the last thing he sees be his mother’s face: whole, and beautiful, and his.

*

Carlin Katz (she/her) is an animist, student herbalist and mother living with her family on traditional Chinook land in Washington State. Her non-fiction is forthcoming in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.

For My Daughter, on Her First Birthday by Svetlana Litvinchuk

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For My Daughter, on Her First Birthday

When my baby was born she had
an extra short umbilical cord

we were extra connected extra close
the doctor’s only choices were to

either cut it immediately or to place her
back in my belly where she could

drink milk from the starry inside
every day I think about how to do that

how it would have been

we could develop our own language
knock twice for yes and once for no

I would describe everything so she
wouldn’t miss a thing. I wouldn’t tell her

about the warplanes flying overhead or
about the ice caps melting around us

I could digest all the world’s pain
for her and let only the sugar pass

when the time comes for her wedding
I can dance on my husband’s feet

the way only daughters do and when
she knocks twice for “I Do”

I will cry tears of joy, my waters
breaking, causing a great flood

*

Svetlana Litvinchuk is a permaculturist who holds BAs from the University of New Mexico. She is the author of a Season (Bottlecap Features, 2024). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, Apocalypse Confidential, Littoral Magazine, Black Coffee Review, Eunoia Review, Big Windows Review, and Longhouse Press. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, she now lives with her husband and daughter on their farm in the Arkansas Ozarks.

Second Drowning by Michael Northen

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Second Drowning

This was not like the time before when I almost drowned
when the water lay above like a thick ceiling I could not reach.
Then I saw the sunlight diffuse though the water
leaning back in that golden acceptance, I closed my eyes.

This time it was like a Japanese painting.
The anesthesiologist said, count to three
I was only a plum branch sketch on canvas
white disappearing into white.

The problem was only mechanical I told my mother
through a phone in her nursing home room
a valve in the heart that needed repair
I’d tell you to come home, she said, but I don’t have one.

This time it was whiteness. No gold water calling.
“Our Father” my mother said, as she fingered the beads,
her prayers traveling in a circle. We knelt on the floor.
Our fingers circulating again through the old design.

*

Michael Northen is the founder and past editor of Wordgathering (2070-2019). He was co-editor of two previous anthologies of disability writing Beauty is a Verb (2011) and The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (2011) both from Cinco Puntos.

What We Hold Onto by Eileen Moeller

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

What We Hold Onto

Not the high-heeled shoe Mother.

The barefoot Mother soaking her
aching feet at night after work.

Mother who did what she had to do.

Not the diet thin Mother.

The cushiony plump Mother
you squeezed from behind
as she stood at the stove.

Mother whose body was beautiful.

Not the whiskey sour Mother.

The coffee cup Mother who
laughed at her own jokes,
so hard it made you laugh,
whether you got them or not.

Mother who skirted depression.

Not the Chrysler Imperial Mother,
helped by mysterious men.

The feisty Mother who told
creditors, Listen, you can’t
get blood from a stone.

Mother who cut deals.

Not the screaming Mother
who could have been in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

The singing mother, who made
long rides, looking out the window,
something we begged for.

Mother who taught transcendence

Not the fast asleep Mother,
when you were getting ready for school.

The sewing Halloween costumes Mother,
who made you a Dutch girl, a Gibson girl,
Mary in blue and white robes,
the sewing Easter outfits Mother,
who got dressed up and took us
to mass once a year.

Mother who took breaks from herself.

Not the tell-you-too-much Mother.

The aproned Mother who seemed
to be without secrets, who told
funny stories about the neighbors
as if that was all she cared about.

Mother big as a moon, waxing and waning.

Not the breast cancer Mother
who froze like a deer in the headlights.

The survivor Mother who fought for
a longer life, the hopeful Mother
who could see her burdens lifting.

Mother of need, who needed mothering.

*

Eileen Moeller lives in Medford, New Jersey with her husband Charlie. Originally from Paterson NJ, she has lived in many places, including Central NY, where she earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She has four books: Firefly, Brightly Burning, Grayson Books 2015; The Girls In Their Iron Shoes, Finishing Line Press, 2017; Silk City Sparrow, Read Furiously Inc. 2020; and Waterlings, Word Tech Communications Inc. 2023. A fifth book, Still Life with Towel and Sand, will be released later this year by Kelsey Books. Her blog is: And So I Sing: Poems and Iconography.

I CAN’T BE THE ONE by Phyllis Cole-Dai

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

I CAN’T BE THE ONE

to welcome you home, but when you arrive
tonight, the faithful trees keeping watch
in the yard curl their toes in pleasure, and all
the doors of the house throw their arms wide
to receive you, and all the curtains draw apart
to lighten the dark as you enter, and all
the chairs scrape back from the kitchen table,
bidding you to sit, and the stew ladles itself
into a bowl beside the candle that lit its own wick
for joy, and the crusty loaf breaks itself open,
to rest upon the wooden board for a dab
of butter, of jam, of honey, any sweetness you
might desire, and each empty bed turns down
its sheets and plumps up its pillows, hoping
to hold you in your sleep—while in one lonely
corner, hugging the wall, the patient piano
waits her turn, soft ache in her taut strings,
ready to play every loving song she’s learned
between the last time you left and this return.

                      for my son, Nathan

*

Phyllis Cole-Dai is a multi-genre writer in South Dakota, soon to relocate to Maryland. The author of more than a dozen books, she co-edited both volumes of the popular anthologies of mindfulness poems. Poetry of Presence. Learn more about her work at her website (phylliscoledai.com). Join The Raft, her online community, and ride the river of the creative life, buoyed by the arts and open spirituality (phylliscoledai.substack.com)

Two Poems by Katey Funderburgh

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Babycake

Winter sun taunted tendrils through my mother’s blinds
on the day she brought me home to no one but herself.
Pressing me to her, peeling back another daughter
with worry coiled in her chest, eyes that saw and saw
each other. Women are snakes: you inside me inside
her inside her mother who died on purpose before
the snows came. I handfed bits of cake to mine, slept
against her until the mirage left her eyelids,
until she started making the coffee again.
Unending rain the whole summer we poured concrete
into the holes we dug in the backyard, erecting
a barn where once there stood nothing but a field and
my mother’s heatvisions of horses we would feed
every morning. This is what saved her— not the bedsheets
I changed but the buckets of grain and hot water
steaming in each stall. She put me in a saddle
when I was still diapered. You were already burrowed
at my spinal center, watching how we almost broke
the tether, severed and sighed in the grass between
the teeth of our horses— the heads always growing back,
the shed skin always returning its need to blink us
back open into ourselves, every daughter
mixing the batter with her hands. I do, she does,
she did, you will— worry it’s not enough.

*

Sappho at the Gay Bar

Here, the Gods are kin to ink on a girl’s arm.
Love, I hear your voice on their tongues.
They print fauna on their bodies. Flora
speaks between fingers

of thin-skinned girls who ask about you.
I have read what remains of us. The same
fire under my skin, the same anger.
I am taught sin.

Here, they are named of me.
Their unmade beds, their grass-gentle hands—
they hold my undead body.
Body I wrote

to worship you, yet here we breathe, among them—

*

Katey Funderburgh is an emerging poet from Colorado. She is a current MFA Poetry student at George Mason University, where she is also a reader for phoebe and SoToSpeak literary journals, as well as for Poetry Daily. Katey’s earlier work has appeared in Josephine Quarterly, samfiftyfour, and Jet Fuel Review, among others. When she isn’t toiling over poems, Katey can be found laying in the sun with her cat, Thistle.

Daddy’s Girl by Julie Benesh

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

DADDY’S GIRL

I wanted to run away
with my mother.
She and I could date
around, compare (love)
notes, and always
have each other.

But she and my father
stayed together.
I grew up, went to college,
got married. Since her death

we’ve grown apart. The world
has changed yet part of me
is stuck at 26, the age
I was when I lost her.

I monitored my female body
for mother’s ailments: glaucoma,
arthritis, metastatic tumors,
but I got instead his bad skin
and silent reflux, his work anxiety,
things of his I’d once blamed
on alcohol and cigarettes
that I eschewed.

My father lived another 18 years.
One time with relatives, we looked
at each other and knew we’d both
had enough of the chatter.
and fled like adolescents.

With my rival and nemesis
I had more in common
than I knew, but why
was I surprised?

We had
the same
great love.

*

Julie Benesh (juliebenesh.com) authored the chapbook ABOUT TIME from Cathexis Northwest Press. She published work in Tin House, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New World Writing, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program and recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant and her full-length poetry collection, INITIAL CONDITIONS, is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press.

Brunch with Missing Mother by Cynthia White

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Brunch with Missing Mother

To have at first missed the man’s you’re ugly,
my mind must have been on coffee
and cream. I must have been dreaming
of eggs with spinach and feta
as he shoved past me and out the café.
I ordered a fat cinnamon roll
to demolish, outer ring first,
working my way to the sticky heart.
My mother often told me,
Looks aren’t everything, though we both
loved a mirror. I needed her that day,
needed to see, in her
generous mouth and elegant
bones, my own beauty, resurrected.

*

Cynthia White’s poems have appeared in Adroit, Massachusetts Review, Southern Poetry Review, ZYZZYVA and Poet Lore among others. Her work can be found in numerous anthologies, including the recent leaning toward light, Poems for gardens & the hands that tend them. She was a finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize and the winner of the Julia Darling memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Said & Meant: Blighted Ovum by Meredith Stewart Kirkwood

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

Said & Meant: Blighted Ovum

When the doctor said
“a blighted ovum isn’t really a loss”
she meant my daughter
weighed less than
a leaf’s last breath before fall

I meant that made her
more unique
than the doctor’s fingerprint pressed
into the morning fog
of an east-facing windowpane

She meant my uterus was tricked
by an accidental switch
and my body became
a farm feeding food
to the air

I meant a weave of cells
me and not me and now
I am both more and less
and how is that not always
what loss looks like?

She meant a line on a lab report
what can only be known
from a microscope

I meant loving is knowing
and has no size

*

Meredith Stewart Kirkwood lives and writes in the Lents neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Her poetry has been published in The Atlanta Review, The Eastern Iowa Review, Right Hand Pointing, MAYDAY Magazine, and others. meredithkirkwood.net

LUCK by Katherine Smith

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LUCK

Maybe you must be a mother
who’s raised a child to adulthood
a woman living in the kingdom
of her back yard, sweat bees,
hosta, the cool mist rising
from the holly tree,
to feel as much
time and solitude as anyone could wish for
is never enough. All it took
was a lifetime, a thousand moments
of luck and here I am
in possession. I believe
it’s a grand thing to sell
nothing. How easily satisfied I am
with my nearly paid-off mortgage,
my dog, the mourning doves
cooing on the roof, this backyard I love
as much as the rooftops of Paris.

*

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Ploughshares, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her books include, Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2003), Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press, 2014), and Secret City (Madville Press, 2022). She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

Mother’s Day by Mary Makofske

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Mother’s Day

         “I am not a mother, and I don’t have one.”
               Posted on Facebook on Mother’s Day

One can choose, or be fated, not to be
a mother. But every woman alive
must be a daughter. Surely she meant
that her mother is dead. One can lose
a mother, but not lose her.
From what she’s shared, I see she’s kept
her mother’s story, a family heirloom.
Her mother’s spirit, sweet and sour, a taste
she’s beginning to acquire, a ghost she tries
to summon or banish at will.

And here’s the corollary she might have said:
Though I’m a daughter, I don’t have one.
So the long line of daughters ends here,
with her. And her shadow daughter—
does she dream she would braid and brush
her hair, watch with trepidation her body
grow and change, deflect with love and grief
the arrows her daughter slings at the flesh that bore her?
Grown, would her daughter speak with her
every day, or never? Idle thoughts,
fantasies drifting and changing like clouds,
weather completely under her control.

Not like the hard-edged memories
of her mother. You cannot erase a mother.
You cannot divorce her, though you may
separate with amity or enmity. Still,
she’s under your skin, in your DNA,
she’s set up a junkyard or castle in your mind.
Her words or voice may spill from your mouth.
In your body her fragile bones may break.

*

Mary Makofske’s latest books are No Angels (Kelsay, 2023), The Gambler’s Daughter (The Orchard Street Press, 2022); World Enough, and Time (Kelsay, 2017); and Traction (Ashland, 2011), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize. Her poems have appeared in more than 70 journals including Poetry East, American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Glassworks, Louisville Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and in 22 anthologies. She has received first prizes in poetry from Atlanta Review, New Millennium Writings, Littoral Press Broadside Contest, Lullwater Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Quiet Diamonds, The Ledge, and Cumberland Poetry Review. marymakofske.com

Dear Mother by Robert Nordstrom

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Dear Mother

I’ve written about you
but not of you. When
you lost your memory
60 years ago, you took mine
with you, left me with
the sepia moments: pressure
cooker meals on the table
4:30 sharp, Kool Aid
in the kitchen, telephone tucked
between ear and shoulder
as you ironed our lives
into tomorrow,
the car your escape
onto roads that always circled back—
a cage with no exit out. And later,
the dark years,
pious friends trumpeting
presumptuous prayers
to exorcise the demons
guarding treasures
I found buried at the bottom
of the old cedar chest:
fancy girls in fancy dresses
dancing to love songs
you played to the blank walls
of the cell where you fell asleep
and I finally awoke.
I am sorry. You did not know
how to say.
I am sorry. I did not know
how to listen.

*

Robert Nordstrom has published poetry in numerous regional and national publications, including upstreet, Main Street Rag, The Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, Chiron Review, Third Wednesday, and various others. Several poems have garnered awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Oregon Poetry Association. His poem “Old Lovers” won the 2014 Hal Prize, and his 2016 poetry collection, The Sacred Monotony of Breath (Prolific Press), received honorable mention from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. His latest collection, Dust on the Sill (Kelsay Books), was published in 2023.

Ironing My Father’s Clothes by Sara Pirkle

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Ironing My Father’s Clothes

Sundays while my father slept,
my mother wrangled us girls
into tights and French braids,
slicked my brother’s cowlick
with a wet comb, slid a roast

in the oven for after church,
then ironed my father’s good shirt,
sprayed Niagara starch on the collar,
and hung it like a preacher’s robe

on the bathroom door. When
I turned twelve, I took over
this chore, and he thanked me
each time, thinking I did it for him,
when I was doing it for my mother.

*

Sara Pirkle is an identical twin, a breast cancer survivor, and a board game enthusiast. Her first book, The Disappearing Act (Mercer University Press, 2018), won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. She also dabbles in songwriting and co-wrote a song on Remy Le Boeuf’s album, Architecture of Storms, which was nominated for a 2023 GRAMMY in the Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album category. She is an Associate Director of Creative Writing at The University of Alabama.

Ode to My Miscarried One by Wendy Kagan

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Ode to My Miscarried One

You, remote as a star—
all you knew was a kind of

floating.

Undulant, slight
as a comma

mote, iota, seedling.

You, magnolia blossom
silken, blush-colored cup
already fringed with brown
before yawning fully open.

You roomed in me just six weeks.
Those days, I called to you
hushed, staticky transmissions
returned to sender.

You, thought bubble
zealots’ unborn
sanctity without a face.

The world is exhausting—
no wonder you retreated
into a sloop of the uterus
that had shored up its moorings
to protect you.

Time was a dream you never woke to.

You simply stopped
growing
then spilled out in a red rush, curdled and thick
as mother’s milk gone bad.

You, soaker
though in that crimson river I saw
nothing of you.

Life sped on without you
who had best expressed its lavish excess:
bright cellular confetti.

Oh, nature’s spare
understudy

I fell in love a little
when your hazy half-light being
brushed against mine.

Why else would I find myself
after the terrible, echoey ultrasound
crying in chrome stirrups
riding your reachless
void, my womb
hollow as a death bell?

*

Wendy Kagan lives in New York’s Catskill mountain foothills. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as The Poetry Distillery, Eunoia Review, Chronogram, and The Baffler. Wendy holds an MA in English from Columbia University. Her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition.

Three Poems by Kathy Nelson

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Adoption Agency, June 11, 1987

Nothing was as I’d thought, the baby not
a bundle but a brink, the day not a rainbow
but a tremor under the diaphragm. I should
have picked her up—the little red knots
of her balled fists, her limbs rigid with sorrow.
The squall. The chasm of her scarlet face. I could

do nothing (did she breathe?) but contain my own wail
and count the sheet’s dancing elephants (yellow)
and sum the ledger of my mistakes. Was I good
enough for this? I was afraid to fail.
But I stayed put.

*

In Carson City the Deer Walk on the Sidewalks

The way the young deer startles at sunrise
to see a human approaching—

the quiet constellation of eyes, nose, ears,
the crown of his antlers.

Boulders rise like molars out of the gums
of suburban yards. Yucca blooms
like white fountains.
And fences, everywhere fences.

O emissary of the oracular…

I set one foot off the curb, making way.
His hesitation to come closer,
then, his graceful, unhurried passing.

I wake up god-hungry and anorexic,
my fears clacking, a bag of bones.

As a prince strolls beggar-lined streets,
velveted and luminous,
blessing the scab-ridden and the cripple,

the deer proceeds like a promise
through his kingdom of pavement,
among the irrigated, blooming roses.

*

After Seeing The Help, My Mother Looks
through a Box of Photos for Cora Washington

         She will ask & you will answer.
               —Lucie Brock-Broido

An archeology. She sifts through the scree
of her childhood, unearthing bone after bone,
searching, searching for the one slender clue.

She leaves behind the fragments of a past—
her father’s smirk, her grandmother’s washboard
posture, the slant of evening across a barn.

Have you been waiting seventy years
for her to find you here, standing like a tree,
witnessing wordlessly, bearing secrets?

You face the camera straight on, powerful arms
at your sides, ready to wring the feathered neck
of any one of the black chickens at your feet,

or to soothe the white child beside you.
Hands that could as easily make fists as biscuits.
As she looks at you, she becomes yours again.

She will ask: Who was I? You will answer.

*

Kathy Nelson, recipient of the James Dickey Prize, MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and Nevada Arts Council Fellow, is author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books) and two previous chapbooks. Her work appears in About Place, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Two Poems by Callie Little

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Headstone

The text was three words:
Your mom passed.

My fifteen minute break.
Break like: my last baby tooth hits cement.

And then I was
back on the sales floor
where everything was plastic-wrapped perfection
where I did my best have-a-great-day smiling
impression of myself.

My coworker said they’d just gotten the worst text.
I wanted to say I bet I can top it, but I folded the tissue
paper behind the register, instead. Buried it.
And you might think that I wanted to go home,
but I wanted to stay tucked into the name tag
that was holding me together.

And then I was
outside.
It isn’t beautiful and poetic to tell you it was raining—
it just was. The rain pours in Seattle no matter how you feel.
I said the impossible words into my phone
The my and the mom and the died
And my spouse came to me.

And then I was
at a restaurant.
I bought us dinner. I bought us drinks.
I spent every minimum-wage dollar I had
and bought every appetizer on the menu
and too much dessert. A mudslide.
A warm apple pie a la mode,
the all-American mother ice cream dream.
I wanted to say, your mom only dies once
to the waiter but I didn’t feel like seeing him hurt for me
so I just said it to the person who loves me most.

And then I was
home.
And the grief only sat beside me, waiting.
I thought it might leave me in the night
like I might wake up
and it would just be another day.
I’d gone two years without hearing her voice
so it wouldn’t be any different.

And then I was
awake
and it was
cement.

*

Every Other Tuesday

Therapy begins at the same time as it always does
this morning, and it’s not the first time my voice
is all stone truth: “I think I might be cursed.”

My licensed therapist who is also secretly a witch
sees the light in my eyes flicker, and their hair stands on end.
They say, “that’s a sign that there’s truth there.”

This is how it works, therapy: I hand them a tangle
made of all my smallest pieces, they point to it
and say, “what a mess.”

Sometimes, this is enough magic to feel
a little bit like sanity— just being told
I’m not imagining it all.

*

Callie Little (she/they) is an artist and author from the Pacific Northwest. Her writing has appeared in VICE, Harper’s BAZAAR, Architectural Digest, and many more fine publications. Her debut non-fiction book, Every Little Thing You Do Is Magic, and its coordinating tarot deck featuring her illustrations will be published by Clarkson Potter in August 2024.

Four Poems by Linda Laderman

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My Mother Holds Her Grief

like a collection of precious stones in a plum pouch. I watch her untie its silk strings & spread the stones across her satin sheets. She separates them by color & holds a cerulean blue with faceted edges up to the light. She rubs it over her body & lingers on her thigh, then takes a red thread & wraps it around. She hangs it from her neck, an amulet to hold her grief. She teaches me to hold her grief too, says it’s as easy as making a bed. Hold it there, fold it here, tuck the corners under. Always tuck the corners under. I sit beside her bed. She gives me a turquoise, cool and smooth. When she turns away, I rub it on my thigh & tuck it under the corner.

*

I should have left you first

but I waited until autumn’s red birds scattered
their seeds, giving way to a bitter winter, expected,

but holding out for a thaw. I waited for the peony,
pale pink, to emerge from the mound of dirt

near our doorstep, dependable, a return to life.
I waited for the blood moon to reveal itself, hopeful

it could be seen through earth’s hazy gaze—
I waited for spring’s rainy season to clear,

though June, being unseasonably stingy,
refused to cede a day without a downpour.

on summer’s cusp, I woke from a half sleep,
my skin drenched in knowing. still, my eyes

stayed shut, until the blue-black night found me.
I waited until the days stretched, the sun set late,

temperatures rose, and the duck in the Hosta
vanished, leaving a gap strewn with leaves and grass,

her batch of eggs hatched and ready to fly. I waited
until the children left, filled with illusions of time,

as if life was forever—a chance to do what I couldn’t.
I waited for your infatuations to wane, but they didn’t.

I waited for the first freeze, then blew my breath
into the icy vapor, kissing winter’s frosted air.

thinking, if I waited long enough, my haunted dreams
would disappear. and you did.

*

When We Dance

We dance on the hardwood floor. His white hair lays
        bare my memories. The nights that lasted until morning.

The sound of Detroit Jazz pushes us. Belgrave, Franklin, Carter.
        I turn it up. I’m wound. Our arms zig and zag, two old saws.

I hip bump him, snap my fingers. He lets out a surprised
        laugh and twists me around our kitchen. I let him do it.

We twirl. His face is red, shy, like a boy. I want to seduce him,
        but I don’t know. I’ve gotten used to not having.

My breath is hard. My hands sweat. I wonder if he took a Viagra.
        I take his arm. Purple blotches stain his skin. Mottled by time.

In the morning, I ask if he remembers when each day took its time.
        How we craved a chance to hear the silence.

Now, I store time in a stone. I step over its power to fool.
        When I feel regret, I sink into a place with no light.

*

Fine China

I worry that my last poem will be my last poem. Let’s talk about quatrains. I create a series of prompts, a list of lines. I’m exhausted from nothing. I list nothings. Nothing good can come from this. Can all this be for nothing? She has nothing on you, You know nothing about me. Only lines stacked, like my fine china, packed away, forgotten as the drop of dried cranberry stuck under the rim. I take the place settings out of the basement cabinet, sit on the cold concrete floor, and remove the felt separators. Nothing. I focus on the memories the dishes hold. An ekphrastic after the matching teapot? Nothing. Empty, like the dishes. I bring two place settings upstairs to soak. I shop for a roasting chicken, red potatoes, baby carrots, and a brown sugar pecan pie. If I can’t write, I’ll fill the damn plates.

*

Linda Laderman is a Michigan writer and poet. She is the 2023 recipient of The Jewish Woman’s Prize from Harbor Review. Her micro-chapbook, “What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know” will be published online at Harbor Review in September, 2023. Her poetry has appeared in The Gyroscope Review, The Jewish Literary Journal, SWWIM, ONE ART, Poetica Magazine, and Rust & Moth, among others. She has work forthcoming in Thimble Literary Magazine and Minyan Magazine. For nearly a decade, she volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Find her at lindaladerman.com

My Mother’s Decluttering Is Gumming up the Works by Sarah Carleton

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

My Mother’s Decluttering Is Gumming up the Works

I get rid of five teapots.
She mails me my great-grandmother’s tea seat, bubbled-wrapped.

I find new homes for plastic bins full of upholstery fabric.
She ships yards of stiff stuff too beautiful to refuse

but destined to sit uncut in a cabinet.
I give her three pairs of earrings

and she sends me three different pairs.
It’s a perfect barter of the things we cling to.

I tell her I don’t want that French clock
and she holds it for me anyway,

anchoring me to the earth’s rotation,
so I get sneaky, knit shawls for her, handmade treasures

she’ll feel obliged to keep, fixing her to this planet-sized
walk-in closet a little longer.

*

Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Cider Press Review, The Wild Word, Valparaiso, and New Ohio Review. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.

Three Poems by Lexi Pelle

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Ode To My Mother’s Thong

When she’d reach for the bargain bread
or to smooth the fanned bangs Kate cut

with craft scissors playing beauty parlor,
I’d see it: cotton Y peeking over her Levi’s—

I remember being mad that she’d do this,
be beyond me, not my mom, disco

the post-divorce dance of undressing
in front of the Winnie-the-Pooh

stickered mirror. Pink with printed
strawberries. Cotton gusset. Tiny bow.

It love lettered the laundry basket, slingshot
me into my life like the birds

I colored penciled onto computer paper,
arching the single-line strokes

to show they were very far away.
Now she’s behind me in the pink

dressing room while I try one on
for the first time, pull on my leggings,

and look at her in the 3-way mirror,
Are you sure you can’t see anything?

*

I Try On The Strapless Top

while my mother is at the store, probably
squeezing lemons or searching
in her oversized pocketbook for coupons.
It’s polyester, pop-star purple, and in it
I feel radiant, like the shine that coats Cassie’s
learner’s permit. All week it hung
in my mother’s closet, dangled from the
hanger’s trouser clips. God knows
where she planned on wearing it. I stand
in front of the full-length mirror that hangs
on the back of the closet door and marvel
at what my new breasts can do, can stop
from falling. The plush, perfect physics
of elastic and connective tissue. Two buoys
marking how far out into adulthood I can swim
before some lifeguard calls me back. Bandeau.
Tube top. Tunnel to privacy which I was
surprised to learn did not mean becoming
my mother. The dance of adjustment, lifting
the fabric back up after every breath—
the idea that someone somewhere could look
at a picture of me from the shoulders up
and think I was naked and be wrong about me.

*

Bleach and Tone

Taylor folds tin foil into my hair while the teenager
to my left talks about her lousy ex. The platinum
blonde on my right says her husband wants to know
what the hell Jessica plans on doing with all those
Irish Step Dancing lessons. In this room we meet
each other’s eyes in the mirror. Should I get a full
or a partial. Taylor doesn’t ask about my fiancé
because I’m not wearing the ring. The air a Bechdel
of bleach. I’m looking at timestamps on my phone
when a 6-ft-something man walks in, brushes past
the receptionist, and kisses me full on the mouth.
Sorry, wrong blonde, he laughs, and looks to my right
for his wife. She looks into her lap. No one says
anything over the blow dryers, the construction
of a new gym across the street, jackhammers
jackhammering. Someone behind me clicks her
acrylics on a counter. I want a full with bangs.

*

Lexi Pelle (she/her) was the winner of the 2022 Jack McCarthy Book prize. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, FreezeRay Poetry, Mixtape, Abandon Journal, and 3Elements Review. Her debut poetry collection is forthcoming with Write Bloody Publishing.

Five Poems by Jennifer L Freed

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

How to Pack for the Move to Assisted Living

Feel once more the weight
of the little brass elephant
with the missing tusks.
Run your fingers along
the banister, the bedroom curtains. Listen
for the ticking of the antique clock
at the end of the hall.

*

Yellow Tags

At the parting edge
of ninety-four, my father
wonders what’s the point,
this accumulation of life
unspooling in Assisted Living,
while his home, so close,
a mere two streets away—
its wooded yard, its rooms
lined with books
and treasures—his home
is packed full

of people this very day, strangers
browsing shelves and closets,
burrowing in drawers, finding
the antique clocks and pewter mugs,
the Nikon camera he bought
in 1969, the Navy blanket
and hammock, boxed
in the basement, saved
for who knows what
but saved, nonetheless, a part
of his passing through
this life, and he wonders
how he got here—his past
now stickered with yellow tags.

*

My Father Helps My Mother with Her Compression Socks

He asks if she’s ready.
She sets her wheelchair brakes.
He kneels and she extends one leg.
He guides her foot to his knee, slides
the cuff of nylon over her heel, then yanks, hard.
The wheelchair wobbles.
Extra material hangs over her toes.
She does not offer her expertise
from years of putting on panty hose: how to
gather the nylon, pull gently, doling out fabric
through delicate fingers.
She thanks him.
He pats her leg, asks if the sock is too tight
below her knee. She always says it’s just fine.
Then they switch—her left foot on his right leg.
Sometimes he helps slide her feet into shoes,
the boxy, wide-mouthed pair with space
for swelling, before putting his hands on her
wheelchair arms, using them to tug himself back
up to standing. She pats his shirt into place
around his belt, makes sure he’s not dizzy
from rising too fast. Then he turns right, to the desk
with his computer, and she wheels herself left, to gaze
out the window while listening to the news.

*

Remote Control

My father, now 96—still spry, bright, quick-witted,
still learning yoga, climbing stairs, using his computer
to find etymologies, stock prices, names
of temples in ancient Greece—now

he asks me if—and this is not an urgent
request, he adds—but if, as my husband and I pack up
our home of 21 years, we should happen upon
the spare remote control for my parents’ TV,

which, my father explains, I would have found in the drawer
of the hutch by the den door of the house my parents left
two years ago, the house I emptied for them
when they moved into assisted living—

if I should come across that remote control now (I might not
have known it worked, my father says,
since it shared that drawer with other, outdated
remotes and garage door openers), or if I find it

in a few weeks, when my husband and I are unpacking
our lives in new, downsized rooms, then
could I please bring it next time I visit,
since the remote they’ve been using till now

isn’t responding anymore when he presses the buttons,
and he doesn’t think it’s the batteries, but
he’s ordering new batteries on-line, in case that’s all
that’s wrong.

*

Cutting My Father’s Hair

He’s still tough as leather, but so much shorter now.
He wobbles when he stands too quickly.
Why didn’t I realize sooner?
When I comment on his fringe of hair—a little fluffy,
I say—he waves a crooked hand
toward my mother, now maneuvering from wheelchair
to couch: She likes it that way.
Then, The damned clipper. Can’t get it to work right anyway.
And so I offer.
Why am I surprised that he agrees
so readily? That he brings out the electric clipper
almost immediately? He hands it over,
small and black with its little pronged comb, asks
if I know how to use it, then warns,
You might find it hard though.
It doesn’t cut as well as it used to.
And you can’t even find the damn power button.
Of course. The worsening neuropathy
in his fingers. His failing eyes.
They have the hairdresser here, but
I don’t know her, and why would I pay
all that money? I don’t even have that much hair.
He glances over at my mother, who catches my eye,
and winks. Your Mum always did it, he says. Before
her stroke.
So I sit him in the living room, under the light,
and he lets me turn his head this way and that.
I trim the patchy beard along his jaw, the grey scruff
brushing the back of his collar. He asks me
to thin his moustache, says the hair
curls into his mouth. I use a tiny scissors
for this, my fingers humming along smoothly
between nostril and lip. I think of the fine tuning
of my muscles, joints, nerves. How much
I have not yet lost. My mother
lies on the couch, watching us, smiling. My dead brother
hovers in my father’s face. My father’s eyes close
as I snip the long hairs of his eyebrows,
the fine whisps crowning his skull.

*

Jennifer L Freed’s full-length collection When Light Shifts (finalist, 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize) explores the aftermath of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage and the altered relationships that emerge in a family crisis. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Anthology. Other awards include the 2022 Frank O’Hara prize (Worcester County Poetry Association), the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club), and honorable mention for the 2022 Connecticut Poetry Award. Please visit jfreed.weebly.com to learn more.

Two Poems by Anna Abraham Gasaway

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments
Not Enough
Never will it be so easy, my sister
said, to calm your child down. She comes bringing
my son to me. I am bleary tired.
It is the first few days, when you sink
or tread water—perfectly flanged lips, just
like Dr. Sears says, he made swallowing
sounds—pulling it out of me—and then milk
in his belly, passed out. I was afraid
to move, he nursed constantly when he
was awake. My husband’s mother came
to visit the first few weeks after his birth.
Mira, she told her sister, rummaging
around in the refrigerator for
the two ounces of milk pumped after I fed
him, Tia shook her head. Both of them clucked
their tongues, Que Flaquito she whispered
to my husband. She’s starving my baby!
my mother-in-law wanted to feed
baby formula from a bottle. Not
enough, not enough my breast pump said.
Too exhausted to explain the benefits—
and how I knew that he would be my only
after the death of his sister at thirty-
six weeks when I wept in the bathtub
and my breasts sprayed in sympathy. I knew
that there would not be another and so
I took him strapped to my chest nursing
all the while to walk the pier just us two.
*
Drenched
Now, you wake up in a swamp of sweat. It only happens near the heart,
your beaded sweat could make a necklace. The sweaty curls at on the back
of your neck could launch a thousand ships. Your entire torso
becomes slick every night, doesn’t matter what you have
or haven’t eaten, doesn’t matter if you’ve done yoga or taken a shower
before bed, you wake up crabby, your T-shirt dripping, and change,
twice a night. Maybe the husband has left the bed because you snore, so
you roll on to his side. You sleep in comfort for a time, but then it
starts again. You sleep in a puddle, a stream, Lake Michigan. Did everybody
know except you? Your doctor laughed when you told her that you soaked
the sheets every night. Oh, that. Yes. It’s all part of the change.
Your aunt set out an Our Bodies Ourselves book when you visited
the Bethesda family twice a year, but Dad said it was sin to know
your bodies. The book said masturbation and held forth no shame.
You didn’t know the term, perimenopause. You were shielded
from the knowledge of how your body was going to change. You thought
that period was blue because Florence Henderson soaked an Always pad
with blue liquid in her commercials and when you finally got your period,
asked yourself what the frick is this? (You would have never said fuck
in those days.) Did they talk about these symptoms in the sex ed classes?
The ones that your parents refused to let you go to? You wake up drenched
and change T-shirts and another and another and the sheets are soaked through.
You don’t change them every time, you just pull back the covers and let the fan
have at it because you will only sweat in the clean sheets. Is that horrible? You
can’t change the sheets and risk your back and so you have to rely on your son
who’s sixteen and a love and he will be glad to do it if asked but look these sheets
have just been changed, and already a wet indentation, a drenched pillowcase.
*
Anna Abraham Gasaway (She/Her) is a stroke-surviving, disabled writer that has been published or has upcoming work in the Los Angeles Review, Literary Mama, Corporeal, The San Diego Poetry Annual and others. She reads for Poetry International at San Diego State University, where she recently received her MFA with an emphasis on Poetry. She can be found on Twitter @Yawp97.

My Mom Dies During a Pandemic by Laurie Rosen

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

My Mom Dies During a Pandemic

A hospital bed replaces
the one she shared with my father
for over 70 years,
her brain long ravaged
by Alzheimer’s.

She writhes,
the nurse says she’s transitioning.
I stand masked
in her bedroom doorway, immobile,
scared. I leave her dying

to the professionals.
It’s her birthday. I carry a card,
decorated with flowers and sparkles,
nothing more.

*

A lifelong New Englander, Laurie Rosen’s poetry has appeared in The Muddy River Poetry Review, Peregrine, Oddball Magazine, Zig Zag Lit Mag, Gyroscope Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Inquisitive Eater, a journal of The New School, Pure Haiku and elsewhere. She is a proud member of the Tin Box Poets in Swampscott, MA and was a reader at The Improbable Places Poetry Tour in Beverly, MA.

At Kohl’s Jewelry Counter by Eileen Pettycrew

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At Kohl’s Jewelry Counter

I want to put them on myself
my mother said of the clip-ons
she beheld like a glittering prophecy,
while I held her purse thick with Kleenex
and the aches and pains of the old.
But she struggled to slide the earrings
onto her lobes and close the clips,
letting them hang halfway, barely,
like spent seed pods,
and the small oh that escaped her mouth
each time one slipped off
was like the faint coo of a distant dove,
as if she had flown toward a horizon
beyond the foothills, and I was alone
on a dirt road listening
for her call. She taught me
how to feel sorry for people,
call them poor things,
like the stocky girl in my class who wore
a miniskirt and knee-high boots,
her thighs like bread dough.
Earrings of loss
falling to the floor, and me,
my mother’s only witness,
the familiar bag of pity ballooning
in my chest, crowding out
anything else I might have felt.

*

Eileen Pettycrew’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, CALYX Journal, Cave Wall, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. In 2022 she was one of two runners-up for the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry and a finalist for the New Letters Award for Poetry. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Eileen lives in Portland, Oregon.

Two Poems by Kathleen Cassen Mickelson

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What I Love About Mondays in the Spring

I love how there is birdsong, urgent and lovely,
as we walk before sunrise, one dog
beside each of us.
I love how the light spreads behind the neighbor’s red pines,
creating incandescent tree silhouettes.
I love how bustle fills our kitchen like an embrace:
dishes clink, cereal rustles, coffee gurgles to its finish.
I love how butter pools into little golden oases
on my dry toast, how you brush your lips on my cheek
when my mouth is full.
And I love how, when you leave,
the silence afterwards is soft, not final.

*

Mothers Understand Each Other

She wakes, adrift between sad and nostalgic,
happy and anxious.
She thinks of the new wedding dress
her daughter will wear in six months
when all traces of little girl will be scrubbed away.

Outside, her husband and dog
stare at a fox in the driveway.
He whispers through the open bedroom window.

Come here! You need to see this.

She peeks out the window, surfaced from sleep
enough to reach for her camera,
goes outside barefoot in pajamas.

The fox watches them all,
sits tall next to the garden,
bushy tail splayed behind,
swollen teats distinct.
A mama fox.

She leans forward, wishes she could speak fox,
one mother to another.

Your babies will be gone too soon.

She adjusts her camera for low morning light.

They’ll have babies of their own,
mates not of your choosing.
You’ll become irrelevant.

The fox blinks, yawns, stretches out in the grass,
mindful of the two humans, the dog,
the hungry kits hidden nearby.

She takes a few more photos,
tiptoes back inside. Her husband and dog follow.
She glances back, but the fox is gone,
a wild mother who knows exactly when to take her leave.

*

Kathleen Cassen Mickelson (she/her) co-founded the quarterly poetry journal Gyroscope Review and acted as co-editor until 2020. She is the author of How We Learned to Shut Our Own Mouths (Gyroscope Press), and her work has appeared in journals in the US, UK, and Canada. Prayer Gardening, a poetry collection co-authored with Constance Brewer, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books at the end of 2023.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Susan Cossette

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Wide Sargasso Sea
August 2000, Darien CT

I do not remember my son’s third birthday.

But the photographs stuffed in my mahogany night table
show a too-thin frantic girl with untamed curls
serving drinks and cake to family,
my mother and father in ecstasy.

I was a mother. I was married.
Oh, how I wanted to please them,
their supplicant, their sacrifice.

Look at the crazy girl,
her father’s daughter.
Crazy like her aunt,
crazy like her grandfather,
beat into tacit submission.

She is safe, for now.

Later, my child clutched two tiny wooden trains,
chubby hands, face smeared with sticky cake icing
regarding sailboats in the harbor
and white clapboard mansions by the sea.

My small house was supposed to be
a sanctuary, but the ocean closed in on me–
marooned among twisted seaweed
and ragged grey oyster shells.

Everything was either brightness, or dark.

Floating face up, palms up to the blood moon
illuminating the grey harbor.

Look at the crazy girl,
her father’s daughter.
Crazy like her aunt,
crazy like her grandfather.

Then came the flames,
then my streaming hair,
tangled and strangled.

The girl caught in a gilt frame,
crooked pirate smile.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

A Short Game of Catch, Then Back to Bed by Bryce Johle

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A Short Game of Catch, Then Back to Bed

We played catch once
with the baseball mitt I got
when Mom and I were movie extras
in our little Pennsylvania town.
You taught me how to throw

straight up sky high, keeping
my eye on the ball, and catch
my own pitch. That way, even if
you aren’t here because your back
and mind ache and it’s just me,

beside my forgettable forty-eight
frames of fame, I can still practice.

*

Bryce Johle is from Williamsport, PA and earned a B.A. from Kutztown University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Parentheses Journal, Litbreak Magazine, Eunoia Review, Literary Yard, October Hill Magazine, and Maudlin House, among others. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife and stepdaughter.

For my mother by Elizabeth McConnell

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For my mother

Within a deep slice of cove, along this ragged coast
straddling the gateway to a labyrinth
of cordgrass and tannin-rich water,
I stand before that driftwood and pine shingled cabin
enchanted by tall and thick pickets of rosemary.

In the evening, breezes weave through
needled branches and her scent beckons
for the shine of golden lemons,
whispers of lavender.
And I promise, in the morning
to snip some sprigs,
take them home to culture.

*

Elizabeth McConnell lives in Morgantown, WV. She earned a BA in English from Hollins University. She has worked with the Morgantown Public Library Children’s Programs and served on the Morgantown Public Library Board of Trustees. Elizabeth participates in the WV Master Naturalist Program, WV Writers, Morgantown Writers Group and the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic Workshops.

Mother’s Ready by Tina Barry

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Mother’s Ready

I wish for my mother’s death,
as she does, if only for her to be reborn
lucky. The take for granted kind of luck–

Pretty face.
An aptitude for math.
Adored.

I go to a tarot reader.
After a few flips, the death card.
I imagine the drawing

on its face is a knight on horseback,
some sign that my mother will exit
life in a romantic stampede.

But it isn’t shining armor, just a hood
draping death’s face.
Is it wrong to wish for her end to be as glorious

as the watercolors she painted?
Café scenes and seascapes.
A coral reef–

red and its shadow–so real,
she could hold it in her palm
like a tiny hand.

*

Tina Barry is the author of Beautiful Raft (Big Table Publishing, 2019) and Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016). Her poems and fiction have appeared in numerous literary publications such as The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, The American Poetry Journal, Sky Island Journal, Nixes Mate, Lascaux Review, Harbor Review (book review), Nasty Women Poets, A Constellation of Kisses and upcoming in Rattle. Tina is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has several Best of the Net nods. She is a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.

Songs for My Mother by Lynn Finger

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Songs for My Mother

1
Every death is
its own fingerprint,
nobody’s is the same:

in a dark house,
in a ward, in the sky,
in the waves, no one
leaves in the same way.

2
As you sleep,
nothing speaks,
webs of dawn gather,
cindered ash motes,
the glitter as sun
streams through
the glass of your window.

3
The oaks outside stand
crooked. I count their leaves.
I wonder why you
don’t open your eyes.
We don’t know if you
will want to see anything
again.

4
I walk in the Dante Forest
not because I want to.
It has a slight path
crossed by unsure sunlight,
where a hundred senilities
cast shadow.

5
My mother was a mermaid,
your story begins,
and my father a bear.
It’s not written down,
It has to have been sung to you,
when young.
You’ll know, if the words
vibrate like a bee
in your hair,
you’ll know.

6
In the dark corner,
the oxygen machine
roars, its own sea,
and your clock stops at 10:35.
I go home to sleep.
The shades are slant against
the evening, and that night
they call,
you are gone.

7
How to stop time.
It’s pouring honey
over the stars to hold them
still, but they continue,
fade.

8
The oak branches creak
in the night wind,
their leaves open up,
eyelashes of the sky.

*

Lynn Finger’s writings have appeared in 8Poems, Perhappened, Book of Matches, Fairy Piece, Drunk Monkeys, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Lynn also had a poetry chapbook released this year, “The Truth of Blue Horses,” published by Alien Buddha Press. She was nominated for the 2021 Best of the Net Anthology. Lynn edits Harpy Hybrid Review and works with a group that mentors writers in prison. Her Twitter is @sweetfirefly2.

The Choice by Sharon Waller Knutson

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The Choice

He has no choice when his mother
dies giving him life with his father’s
name sealed on her blue lips.

He has no choice when his adopted
mother chooses him and sits
with him during sickness and nightmares.

Walks him to school, makes him peanut
butter sandwiches, kisses his bruises
and laughs at his silly jokes.

But when he is ten, he is asked
to make a choice at the Rose
Ceremony on Mother’s Day.

White if your mother is dead.
Red if she is alive. The only mother
he has known is sitting stiff

on a folding chair and he knows
she wants to jump up and say,
It’s okay if you choose her.

And he knows his birthmother
who is watching over him
wouldn’t mind if he chose red.

But it is his choice. With his right
hand he reaches for the red rose
and with the left hand he picks the white,

sticks them in his buttonholes
and marches off with the scout troop
to salute their mothers.

*

Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist who lives in Arizona. She has published several poetry books including My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields (Flutter Press 2014,) What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say and Trials & Tribulations of Sports Bob (Kelsay Books 2021) and Survivors, Saints and Sinners (Cyberwit 2022.) Her work has also appeared recently in GAS Poetry, Art and Music, The Rye Whiskey Review, Black Coffee Review, Terror House Review, Trouvaille Review, ONE ART, Mad Swirl, The Drabble, Gleam, Spillwords, Muddy River Review, Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, Red Eft Review and The Five-Two.

Three Poems by Meg Freer

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Grief Has a Name

A full ten minutes at sunset, hundreds
of crows fly south over the woods.
Moments after the last one,
snow blows in from the north.

I follow sheep trails across the fields,
unwind details I have been avoiding,
mental terrain more suited
for moose than human.

Mom’s two birthday balloons cling
together in her dining room for a day,
before one migrates to the kitchen
and the other moves into her bedroom.

A day later, the bedroom balloon
floats into Dad’s study to stay
just above the books. Dad must be
directing this scene from beyond.

In my dream, he fades into view
in the doorway holding a basketball,
says nothing, watches while I read
on the sofa, then drifts away.

Grief wants me to call it by name,
knows all 360 joints in my body,
tapes their seams to keep itself
from floating into oblivion.

*

All the Sounds of Summer

As gently as he once held a fledgling blue jay,
he cradles his sister’s arm, traces each of the thin,
horizontal lines he never knew were there,
saddened by scars not yet faded to white.

All the sounds of summer vanish
as he enters into her night and wonders at the fluency
of hands that treat the body in such disparate ways.
How to fathom the plight of molecules gone awry?

Ever distressed at the sight of his own blood,
though he understands artery over vein, he can’t
understand pain that calls out for more pain and hopes
his sister will fly, as the fledgling he buried never did.

*

New Mother
        for Mary P. and Minnow

I offer to walk with her on the nearby trail,
get her out of the house for a while.
We greet Archie and Jughead, the goats
with curly horns, as we pass their pen.
I pick up a guinea hen feather to bring home.
She sets a brisk pace as we leave the farm.
It hasn’t hit her yet, this unexpected freedom.

She stops short, as if she’s seen an apparition.
A cow stares at us through the brush.
What are you doing way over here by the fence?
Shouldn’t you be over with the horses?
This moody cow moves around the horse pasture
every day, rarely spends time with the other cows,
sometimes goes off by herself to figure things out.

We leave the cow to her moping, resume walking,
then she stops, looks back down the trail.
Wait. Am I even supposed to leave the farm?
I have babies back there, you know.
I reassure her that it’s fine to take a break,
she nursed her puppies, she needs fresh air.
She catches a whiff of spring and trots off.

The robins and redwing blackbirds are singing,
the stream is flowing, the spring scents
keep enticing, we continue our walk.
A bit further and she stops again, looks back
the way we’ve come, looks up at me.
Are you sure I was supposed to leave?
My puppies might need me, you know.

I try to persuade her to keep walking,
but no luck. We turn back, the cow
is still at the fence, but she doesn’t notice,
she is so excited to return to her seven pups—
lick them all over, move them around
with her paws and nose so they all
get a turn to nurse—be a good mother.

*

Meg Freer grew up in Montana and now teaches piano in Kingston, Ontario, where she enjoys the outdoors year-round. Her prose, photos, and poems have won awards in North America and overseas and have been published in journals such as Ruminate, Juniper Poetry, Vallum Contemporary Poetry, Arc Poetry, Eastern Iowa Review, and Borrowed Solace.

Bird Watching by Maureen Fielding

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BIRD WATCHING

In my mother’s garden
amid the blue hydrangeas,
begonias and hibiscus blooms,
a red-headed finch sits atop the fence,
nervously eyeing the feeder.

Prodding hungry stomach,
tiny internal debate—
last doubts extinguished,
fears overcome,
he flutters from fence to feeder,
hurriedly, blissfully
guzzles the seed provided with love,
always aware
that his quiet meal
may be jarringly interrupted,
that the same hand that pours the seed
and fills the bath
is the same that flings open the doors
and shatters the moments of silence, safety, sustenance.

For sometimes my mother stands
entranced at the window,
tuned to the finch’s fragile courage.
At other times
her world is devoid of finches.
She tramps loud and heavy
on the hearts of all.

*

Maureen Fielding is an associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State Brandywine. Her work has appeared in Westview, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Marathon Literary Review, WLA, and other journals. She has taught English in South Korea and is currently working on a chapbook based on research conducted in South Korea about Japanese Militarized Sexual Slavery. She has also written a novel inspired by her experiences as a Russian intercept operator in West Berlin during the Cold War.

Three Poems by Harrison Bae Wein

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

My Aunt When She Drank Scotch

Whenever my aunt babysat for us
intending to stay the night
carrying her canvas tote,
wearing white leather tennis shoes,

I would wake to her sobbing
and sneak into the guest room
where she sat on the hideaway bed,
wearing her blue men’s pajamas,

nursing a scotch, both hands
wrapped around the glass.
What was wrong, I didn’t know
until one night she told me

that she once loved someone
who wasn’t a Jew
but my grandmother drove him away,
and after that, she lived like a widow

with no one to talk to over meals,
no one to sleep beside
no one to help her pick out bath towels
or have children with.

I heard the ice tinkle
as she sipped, eyelids shut,
and to this day I’ve found
comfort in scotch,

its caramel scent and honey glow;
I didn’t know then
how it burned your throat,
that it wasn’t like candies and sweets.

*

Memory of My Grandfather

Grandma divided the bed
whenever I slept over
with a wooden board,
saying she didn’t want me
catching his cancer,

but aside from that,
all I can recall
is that small apartment kitchen,

how he shuffled past
the old gas oven
you had to light with a match
in his collared striped pajamas
to sit at the dining table

and drink his
Pepto-Bismol
from a small juice glass
to ease his stomach
after the chemo,
the chalky pink sludge
leaving a foam line
on his lip,

and then how I wailed
when I learned
they’d had his funeral
without telling me—

although to this day
I don’t know
what it was
I thought I’d missed.

*

My Mother Loses Me at the Department Store

I am stranded on an island
of a mannequin stand, sitting and
peering up at the pale plastic skin,
her dress the color of canaries,

a man in an armchair winks
as if we’re in a secret club, but I
focus on the women meandering,
rummaging for bargains,

mother nowhere in sight,
muzac drifting through the air
as cash registers open and close,
sounding like distant thunder.

They disappear behind racks
of packed rayon and wool,
scarves drooping from steel saplings,
hats perched like hawks,

and I wonder what would happen
if they turn off the lights,
and lock all the doors, with me still inside—
who will ever find me

when I spot her emerging
from a dressing room,
smiling and
wearing a new dress,
the tags already removed.

*

Harrison Bae Wein’s fiction and poetry has appeared in several literary journals. His series of laboratory stories, Blinded by Science, was the first fiction published at LabLit.com. He has also been a finalist in the Glimmer Train Family Matters short story contest. Harrison has won several awards as a health and science writer, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Richmond Times-Dispatch and many other outlets. He founded and now edits two health publications at the National Institutes of Health. You can find him online at http://harrisonwein.com.

For Mother, Whose Maiden Name Was German by Donna Hilbert

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For Mother, Whose Maiden Name Was German

From this porch swing,
I look into the woods
beyond the highway,
and dream of you, Mother,

who didn’t like the woods,
but loved a porch swing,
who liked horizons clean:
ocean beyond a bank
of sand, a backroad arrow
through billowing
seas of wheat.

You didn’t like the woods,
but loved a porch swing.
O cradle of memory.
Your name, Zumwalt:
into the woods.

You didn’t like the woods,
uneasy when the way
could not be seen.
How did you enter then
the pitchblack woods
unafraid, serene?

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. Her new collection, Threnody, is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press. She is a monthly contributing writer to the on-line journal Verse-Virtual. Work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Braided Way, Chiron Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, One Art, and numerous anthologies. She writes and leads private workshops in Southern California, where she makes her home. Learn more at www.donnahilbert.com

Three Poems by Faith Shearin

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Messages from my Mother
Cousin Violet is recovering from a gallbladder operation. I can give
you her address if you would like to send flowers.
Aunt Fern has a blockage in the main artery of her neck
and is scheduled for surgery. Uncle Gus has a spot in his eye.
There was a flood at the summer cottage. I went out to start the car and opened
the door to a cloud of mold and mildew. In our absence, all that flies
and crawls has invaded our kitchen. Sadie’s friend’s mother
passed away and Mildred is driving to Boone
for the funeral tomorrow. 95 is flooded but she is hoping to take a detour.
Uncle Uther has a newborn baby girl. She has Uther’s chin.
The oven is broken. I stayed on hold all morning trying
to schedule a repair person. Our friend Hoyt may need a cortisone shot in his hip.
According to Selma, Miss Jane is growing feeble.
Your father has a new toothbrush that he says is better than going to the dentist.
It’s okay if you hate the window seat and matching pillows;
it would just be nice to hear your voice.
*
My Mother, Killing Mice
My mother was assigned mice
by her college Biology professor,
asked to perform
experiments involving mazes
and rewards, but she forgot
to feed them when she left
for Christmas holiday
in a rush of train tickets
and trunks, her best dress
and silk scarf wrapped
in tissue paper, my father waiting
for her in a top coat
on a platform made vague
by arrival. So her mice grew weak
in the glass world of her
forgetfulness: fur the color of winter,
cold whiskers, bowls of hunger.
*
My Mother, Getting Lost
She did not mind a foreign landscape or an absence
of cardinal directions. When I rode with her —
windows open, farmhouses made of moonlight —
she did not plan a route but let everything
become unfamiliar, her steering wheel
unaware of a prime meridian or compass rose.
It was as if she had been born
with the earliest star-shaped
Babylonian Map inside her: all highways surrounded
by a bitter river, land beginning in mountains
but ending in marsh, each destination a triangular wedge
where a bull dwells or the sun is not visible,
beyond the flight of birds.
*
Faith Shearin’s books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Moving the Piano (SFA University Press), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Head Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Recent work has been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry.

One Poem by Andrea Potos

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY OF MY MOTHER’S PASSING

Her joy becomes my joy. —
         Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

This June morning, flickering light and shadow
on the spread pages of my book
while somewhere above me in the arching
and waving branches of the beeches, one cardinal
keeps throbbing an unceasing song.
And the sky–did I mention the cloudless sky?
The softest blue, as if created
with the pastels of a master, then brushed across
with the gentlest sweep of her arm.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Marrow of Summer and Mothershell, both from Kelsay Books; and A Stone to Carry Home from Salmon Poetry. You can find her poems many places online and in print, most recently in Spirituality & Health Magazine, Braided Way, Buddhist Poetry Review, and Poetry East. She is actively working on a new collection of poems, generated from the epigraph on this poem, called “Her Joy Becomes.”

On a hike up the back mountain by Melody Wang

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On a hike up the back mountain

my mother told me a story of a goose
shot down from the sky by a hunter’s single bullet:

its mate, stunned by the death of his beloved,
hurled himself headfirst into the rocks below

at dizzying speed, yielding the hunter two geese —
I can only picture the weight of his bounty that day.

Some of us never know when
just enough becomes too much

exactly how much pressure it requires
to hold a heart in your cupped hands, still

frantic from overuse, cool and slick
with the aftermath of someone else’s longing

*
Melody Wang currently resides in sunny Southern California with her dear husband. In her free time, she dabbles in piano composition and also enjoys hiking, baking, and playing with her dogs. She can be found on Twitter @MelodyOfMusings.

Unstuck by Brian O’Sullivan

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Unstuck

Is there a newsreel, dear?,
Mom asks in the darkened cinema, her voice bubbly,
and I want to tell her there are no newsreels anymore—
Edsels are gone and flying DeLoreans are coming—
but I know for her newsreels are
now, and,
breathing buttered popcorn,
I feel my hand clenching under my seat’s arm,
picking at dried bubble gum, and
I don’t want her to hear sirens, so, as the screen flickers, I, smiling though tightened jaws,
whisper back, No newsreel today, Mom.
              But watch!

*

Brian O’Sullivan teaches rhetoric and English literature in southern Maryland. He has published in Everyday Fiction and in academic non-fiction periodicals, including KB and Studies in American Humor.

A Poet’s Mother Dies from Covid by Le Hinton

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A Poet’s Mother Dies from Covid

No one inherits eloquent words nor leases the brilliance
of a perfect sonnet transcribed onto parchment in blue ink.

I speak no language that elevates each syllable so that every
word will be remembered alongside the dead.

It is a myth that poets possess inexhaustible grace
and passion, or feel more deeply than other human bodies.

There is no hidden box, dovetailed jointed, stained and polished,
that holds the perfect magic of metaphor and meter.

There is only a man standing mute over granite,
only a boy who misses his mom.

*

Le Hinton is the author of six poetry collections including, most recently, Sing Silence (Iris G. Press, 2018). His work can be found or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2014, The Progressive Magazine, the Skinny Poetry Journal, The Baltimore Review, The Pittsburgh Review, and outside Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Two Poems by Betsy Mars

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Kavod HaMet*

I circle among my dead,
trying not to neglect anyone.
What can I say of those
I have never known?
Even my mother eludes me,
her mind ever hidden
in shadows. We all flee
when we imagine danger,
acquiring a taste
for what can be carried,
the weight of the unrisen.

*honoring the dead

*

Bearing Water

To wash dust from jagged leaves
I turn the hose on the hibiscus.
Shriveled flowers fall to dirt,
water drips into soil, roots
reach for a sip, when suddenly
a moth, its rusty wings heavy
with moisture, fanning the same water
into steam, flutters to the earth,
damned while new buds open.
Some feel my intentions as mercy,
others nearly drown.

*

Betsy Mars practices poetry, photography, pet maintenance, and publishes an occasional anthology through Kingly Street Press. Her second anthology, Floored, is now available on Amazon. In 2020, her poem was selected as a winner in Alexandria Quarterly´s first line poetry contest series. In addition, she was a semi-finalist in the Jack Grapes poetry contest as well as the Poetry Super Highway annual contest. Her work has recently appeared in Sky Island Journal, Kissing Dynamite, Better Than Starbucks, and Gyroscope among others. She is the author of Alinea (Picture Show Press) and co-author of In the Muddle of the Night with Alan Walowitz (Arroyo Seco Press).

One Poem by Patricia Davis-Muffett

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What to do with your grief
       for Dionne, June 2020

Butter. Sugar. Flour. Salt.
I am doing what I know.

Nineteen, I call my mother crying:
“I can’t make the pie crust work,”
“Come home,” she says. “We’ll fix it.”
The ice in the water,
the fork used to mix,
the way she floured the board.
It’s chemistry, yes–
but also this:
the things you pass
from hand to hand.

9/11. Child dropped at preschool.
Traffic grinds near the White House.
A plane overhead. The Pentagon burns.
The long trek home to reclaim our child.
We are told to stay in. I venture out.
Blueberries to make a pie.

My mother, so sick. Not hungry.
For a time, she is tempted by pies.
I bring them long after taste flees.

New baby. Death. Any crisis.
I do what my mother taught me.
Butter. Sugar. Flour. Salt.
I bring this to you–this work of my hands,
this piece of my day, this sweetness,
all I can offer.

Today, Minneapolis burns
And sparks catch fire in New York,
Atlanta, here in DC.
My friend’s voice says
what I know but can’t know:
“This is my fear every time they leave me.”
Three beautiful sons, brilliant, alive.
I have little to offer. I do what I know.

*

Patricia Davis-Muffett (she/her) holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She was a 2020 Julia Darling Poetry Prize finalist and received First Honorable Mention in the 2021 Joe Gouveia OuterMost Poetry Contest. Her work has appeared in Limestone, Coal City Review, Neologism, The Orchards, One Art, Pretty Owl Poetry, di-verse-city (anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival), The Blue Nib and Amethyst Review, among others. She lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband and three children and makes her living in technology marketing.

Two Poems by Faith Paulsen

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Mother-in-Law

Invited to call her Mom, silently I called her Umbrella in Sunshine
Flea-Market Wristwatch Three Phone Calls A Day
Flash Flood Warning.
Why take a chance?
The cat will suck the breath out of the baby.
Spare Room Hoarder of get-well cards and flashlights
bottles of sleeping pills. (They’re not habit-forming – I should know,
I’ve been taking them for years.)
She called me Broken Eggs Hamster in a Plastic Ball.
Half-hour Early/Ten Minutes Late
She called me Barefoot in Snow–
That name I kept.
Years after her death
I wake stunned
when others call me Worry and I respond Be Safe.
Please don’t do
anything stupid.
Call it Poetic Justice. Call me So soon?
I call myself, I Didn’t Know—

*

My Mother’s Pessary *

Was she buried with it, I wonder?
That pinky-ball that for years supported
the vault over my begetting? My fault,
we used to joke.
Large baby, traumatic birth,
long-awaited longed-for,
late, costly.

Decades later, I witnessed
the price paid in her halting gait,
weary eyes (blue green like mine)
seeking a bench so she could sit down.
This is not like you, Mom.

Then it was I who supported
undressed, lifted. Even though
I was by then several times a mother —
I did not know this secret toll
that there could be this
late-in-life weight in the pelvis
pregnancy of years
this falling through
her overstretched muscles
falter, fail, a curtain’s elasticity lost
turned inside-out like a sock.

Attended, midwife to my mother’s aging
counted her breaths
an inexorable roller coaster inverted
dangles on the verge of dive-drop,
ripening
her tummy measured to house this blushing little thing
that for the last years of her life plugged up the dam
and kept the sky from falling.

* A therapeutic pessary is a medical device most commonly used to treat prolapse of the uterus.

*

Faith Paulsen’s work has appeared in Ghost City Press, Seaborne, and Book of Matches, as well as Thimble Literary Magazine, Evansville Review, Mantis, Psaltery and Lyre, and Terra Preta, among others. Her work also appears in the anthologies Is it Hot in Here or Is It Just Me? (Social Justice Anthologies) and 50/50: Poems & Translations by Womxn over 50 (QuillsEdge). She has been nominated for a Pushcart, and her chapbook A Color Called Harvest (Finishing Line Press) was published in 2016. A second chapbook, Cyanometer, is expected in 2021.

Winter’s Toll by Melanie Figg

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Winter’s Toll

The deer are starving.
Summer was too dry and snow came too soon
and too thick. They usually don’t come out
of the woods until February. It’s almost Christmas
and they’re in the trailer park by ten.

My mother died a week ago.
We cleaned out her refrigerator,
found two bins of apples
she had no energy to can
and left them for the deer.

After bar close I drive in slow: two doe and a fawn.
For a minute I feel lucky—to see animals so hungry
they’re at front doors eating
Christmas wreaths. One doe swings her head,
watches me park and go inside
my mother’s house. They keep walking,
looking for apples on the snow-covered lawns.

*

Melanie Figg’s debut poetry collection, Trace (New Rivers Press) was named one of the 100 Best Indie Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. Melanie has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The McKnight and Jerome Foundations, the Maryland State Arts Council, and others. Her poems, personal essays, and book reviews can be found in dozens of literary journals including The Iowa Review, Nimrod, and The Rumpus. As a certified professional coach, Melanie teaches creative writing, offers women’s writing retreats, and works one-on-one with writers and others. http://www.melaniefigg.net

Two Poems by Adam Chiles

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Inheritance

My mother found the dog rooting through
the mulch out back, nosing rotten cabbage leaves.
A blood shot eye. Need pushed deep into its nostrils.
What could she do but love the animal,
this famished stray, dirt steeled firm to its skin.
She nursed the creature back. Took to the fells
each day. Wandered the gravel paths
above the stacks and kilns, happy to be absent
from the tempers of that house. It didn’t last.
Her father kicked the animal out one night.
Snatched his supper plate and slammed it
against the wall. My mother rubs her arm
as she speaks. Eighty years on, she still feels it,
that sting, that phantom shard of porcelain.

*

Widower

Weekends, he parks his bike at the oak
and eases through the chapel turnstile.
As usual, a satchel slung over his back
filled with clippers, trowels, a bunch of
wildflowers. He walks to her plot, takes
out his tools and begins, digging out
a thin trench of soil, trimming its frame.
And what else can he do for her now
but this weekly crop and mend. His face
lost to a rampant beard. Below him,
daffodils, their ceaseless gold alarms.

*

Adam Chiles’ latest collection Bluff will be published by Measure Press this Summer. His work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2006 (Samovar) and has appeared in numerous journals including Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Connotation Press, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Magma, Permafrost, RHINO, The Threepenny Review and Thrush Poetry Review. He is professor of English and Creative Writing at Northern Virginia Community College and serves on the editorial board at Poet Lore.

Naviphobia by Sean Lynch

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Naviphobia

My mother was once
a teenage girl trapped

on a boat in the middle
of the bay with a boy

her father called Jesus
because he was a dirty hippy.

No oars and no motor
just time and the sun.

I don’t know how she reached land
but when she did, she decided to stay forever.

Not long after, Jesus got shot in the leg
while breaking into a junkyard

so she left him and met my father.
My mother was a perfect swimmer

but she never set foot
on water again.

*

Sean Lynch is a poet and editor who lives in South Philadelphia. Recent poems appear in Hobart, Meow Meow Pow Pow, and SurVision Magazine. He’s the founding editor of Serotonin and the Program Director of the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association, in Camden, NJ.

Traveling Back by Barbara Sabol

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Traveling Back

On our nightly walks, my dog, Traveler,
will crane toward the occasional passing car,
studying each driver’s face, maybe searching

for his first master, the one who might have
taught him to lean full-bodied into love,
who conditioned in him a fierce loyalty.

Perhaps gone astray chasing a chipmunk
in the park or, slipping past a backyard gate,
he found himself irretrievably lost.

Rescued from the street two counties
and six years removed, my cherished companion
may believe, in the instinctive sensory wash

of canine thinking, that his first master
has all this time been driving everywhere,
still looking for him.

I was the family black sheep, declaring to the one
whose life was given over to my care,
I wish you weren’t my mother, with no thought

of my power to bruise. Knowing only the chafe
of that bond, I left with a one-way bus ticket
in my blue jean pocket. In the last years

of my mother’s life, I worked my way back,
fumbling with the intricacies of that knot,
frayed with time and distance, but still holding.

If one day some driver should stop, push open
the passenger door, call my dog by a name
that pricks up his ears, makes him shiver and whine

with joy, I wonder if I could release his leash,
let him leap into the car, and then with a resolve
hard as love, close the door behind him.

*

Barbara Sabol’s fourth collection, Imagine a Town, was awarded the 2019 Poetry Manuscript Prize from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals; most recently, Evening Street Review, Northern Appalachia Review, The Comstock Review, and Literary Accents, as well as in numerous anthologies. Her awards include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Barbara lives in Akron, OH with her husband and wonder dogs.