Tag: relationships

Five Poems by Erin Hoover

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Poem I Wrote for Our Life Together

Born on a bed of eggshells, I broke them
by virtue of my body’s weight, by moving.
Soon I grew used to their give and crack.

My parents fed me eggshells. My tongue
licked the hard protective bloom. My teeth
ground down thin layers of calcium carbonate.

Those proteins were all I had. With a brush
and albumen glue, I painted the crystals
from crushed shells on the mold of my body.

The clothes I made creased and fractured
at my elbows and knees, split when I sat,
so I learned to stay still, straight leg standing.

Beneath me, the eggshell floor splintered
with each step. Helpless, I called my lover
who climbed through the jagged holes

we called windows. I could have predicted
he would break everything he touched
and then accuse me of carelessness, and he did.

I felt myself cleave under him in the way
I was taught to want. The membranes
of my body collapsing, reminding me of birth.

Our gentle thrashing destroyed the house.
I no longer cared for the bed, the clothes
whose delicate remnants I stuffed in my mouth.

After, I woke up naked, alone, and hungry.
Of course, I wear regular clothes and live
in a regular house, my diet varies, and I leave

when I please. I was never crushed, not
like this, but the eggshells say what I mean:
that no matter how careful I am, grief will come.

* 

The Apartment

              after “Dream House as World Building,”
              from In the Dream House: A Memoir
              by Carmen Maria Machado

My unit looked like every other unit, or close,
more than one hundred copies, but to explain,
it was on the third floor, new apartment in a brand-new
building. Safer, I thought, before I understood
being unsafe. It was the first new place I’d ever lived.
No broken plumbing or fat roaches scuttling
from kitchen drawers, scaring my daughter, our first
like that. You need to know that I cried happy tears
when we moved in, not everyone would rejoice,
but we did. My daughter did. Two floors below,
his apartment was laid out exactly the same. When
he first moved in under me, I felt déjà vu
in those bare rooms. A tenant for years, I’d known
the families in that place before him, but it must
be said, I hardly knew him when he moved in
as my boyfriend, this close proximity never
my wish, whatever you want to believe. Our primary
bedrooms had four large windows, and mine
on the third floor overlooked a small engineering firm
whose employees took lunch hour walks or on cold days,
dusted snow from their windshields in the parking lot,
warm exhaust plumes, visible puffs of breath.
I don’t know if he ever looked out his windows
except at me, but I kept my blinds open, so anything
I felt—my fear—I projected on this scene. Visitors
doted on the size of my primary bedroom, spacious
like the bedroom of a house. Like his bedroom,
this space would become a site of violence. I tried
to describe to my lawyers, to the judge, the suffocating
closeness of the landing and stairs, too narrow
for two-way traffic. We could only walk single file
as I held my daughter’s hand, shushing her,
because we lived on top of each other, tripping over
one another, peering inside one other’s units,
and I had no way to bypass the lower doors,
his door, but he could have avoided coming upstairs
to mine. Nobody asked him to treat those stairs
or my door like an extension of his home. Outside,
a walkway led from the building to our cars,
situated so no one approached our building without
being seen. It was grand—to the degree that it could be—
but it afforded no privacy. We all knew who came
or went. After I left him, that walkway became
a problem, like the pet waste stations, excuse
for anyone, but especially him holding his leashed dog,
to stand staring up at my balcony. When I imagine
him, and I sometimes still do, he is looking up.

* 

You Need to Connect with the Heroine of Your Story

The cards say it. The pointer on every spinning wheel.

What’s that meme? You are the one who is coming to save you.

Inside me lives a connoisseur of risk that for a time I chose not to heed.

Such finely tuned intuition moves beyond awareness of predator or prey.

I’m not innocent but I forget catalogues of lessons in order

to get through the day. She never left me. Rather I turned

from knowing. I thought I chose love, but it was a facsimile, a pack

of torture devices bundled in gauze. The heroine says one day you’ll see

this relationship as a vehicle for creative growth. We could have gone

on longer, my friends know. I stopped us. His friends might

have scoffed, he wouldn’t hurt you, but he had no friends and he had already

hurt me. The heroine isn’t writing about bruises but a topography of pain.

What is it they say? Some things you can’t unsee. You can’t unfeel.

The low voice at the table, wise hands on my shoulders.

The heroine says don’t think about all you ignored, but that you finally saw.

* 

The Universe Wants

The universe wants me to change the locks.
The universe wants me to take his things to Goodwill.
The universe wants me to wipe his fuck off with a guy I meet online.
The universe wants this story to be personal but not too personal.
The universe wants me to petition the court.
The universe wants the police to be unable to enforce the order due to proximity.
The universe wanted him to be my neighbor though I never wanted it.
The universe wants every lawyer I meet to tell me I’m fortunate we aren’t married. That we have
                            no children or property together.
The universe wants his new girlfriend to smudge stick his apartment.
The universe wants him to subpoena our neighbors.
The universe wants all of the people he subpoenaed to have nothing to say.
The universe wants me to have to move because I am truly afraid and the order is unenforceable.
The universe wants me to apply for tenure and submit my application while moving.
The universe wants me to lose two dress sizes walking off my anger for hours a day.
The universe wants my telogen effluvium.
The universe wants this story to be relatable.
The universe wants our hearing continually delayed.
The universe wants my nervous breakdown outside the courthouse.
The universe wants my dosage doubled.
The universe wants my mother to break her back when visiting me for the hearing he delayed.
The universe wants my mother to do the nine hour car ride again on a broken back.
The universe wants my father to ask to try reasoning with my abuser and for me to stop him.
The universe wants me to help others understand the threat is actual.
The universe wants the hearing—is ravenous for the hearing.
The universe wants my neighbor who was going to testify for me to get Covid.
The universe wants my best friend to have laryngitis during her testimony.
The universe wants people to keep telling me they know this will teach my abuser a lesson.
The universe knows I didn’t want the order to punish him.
The universe knows what happened between us.
The universe knows what love is and is not.
The universe wants the judge to grant the order without a scratch on me.
The universe wants my abuser to have to pay my lawyer’s fees.
The universe wants him to move away.
The universe wants my head to begin to clear.
The universe wants to know whether this story will save anybody.
The universe tells me I am watched over by ancestors.
The universe wants me to feel creative.
The universe wants this story reborn into another form.
The universe wants me to transform.
The universe has been telling me all along. I am close.

*

A Year Out

I woke and showered and readied for work,
but I don’t remember what I ate or whether
I ate. I think I was bracing myself, knew
what was coming, but who can know,
and I can only speak from retrospect, it’s all
I have in this moment. I might not have eaten.
I might have dreamed the night before,
but that I don’t know that, either. So much
of this process is understanding which facts
matter. It matters that my daughter was in
her second week of second grade, precise age
she’ll never know again. Does it matter
that she carried the bag she wore to school
before that morning, and for many days after,
and that he bought it for her? I might recall
the bag bouncing against her legs as she ran,
the sun reflected white on her blond skull,
or I might have made it up, but regardless,
I know that one morning about a year ago
after my former partner tried to assault us,
I went to a shelter, and then, I told my story
to a judge, and more, I said what happened
to anyone who would listen. It’s true, of course,
but so much more is true, like any big feeling
barely contained, there is this tenuous
courting of disaster behind it. Even so,
a story took shape, solidified. So what
if it was only adrenaline, the heat I felt course
through me, my arms frozen to the chair,
my legs crossed, for months, the shallow
breaths I took as I loaded the dishwasher
or taught a class, packed a sandwich or applied
for tenure. I gave up my words to advocates
a few hours after it happened, offered them forth
to build a story, in the rounded longhand
of the woman who wrote it down for me, for
the judge, yes, but also the person in the chair
who had to go home that night and protect
her daughter. I’m no fool. What really happened
is true but also manufactured. A document.
A year since I first began that delicate
piecework, that shaping, I can bend my story
at will. Flimsy, made up of sensations I pulled
from my deeper parts, and a year out, I want
to access that realm of my body, my insensible,
living-outside-of-narrative self, more than
posture or breath but the part of me that
moves or stays still, that acts. The self
returned from elsewhere that says, you are safe.
It’s August, a year later, and broiling hot.
Before sense retreats, I let the sun touch me.

*

Erin Hoover is the author of three poetry collections: Barnburner (Elixir, 2018), No Spare People (Black Lawrence, 2023), and Consent (Black Lawrence, 2027). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and The Sun. Hoover lives in Tennessee and teaches creative writing at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts a poetry reading series, Sawmill Poetry, and serves as the Poet Laureate of Cookeville, Tennessee, in 2026-2027.

Three Poems by Abby E. Murray

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Political Love Poem

for my political love: I wanted to get you
       something apolitical, but all I could find
were roses and the socialist movement.
       All I could find was chocolate and colonialism.
I wanted to give you something untouched
       by human mistake and cruelty—no diamonds,
no flights to countries safer than this.
       A friend suggested I offer you mathematics,
the objective truth of numbers. Did you know
       Pythagoras was murdered? Did you know
Einstein discovered refuge in New Jersey?
       Is there even such thing as harmless small talk?
If there was, I’d buy a coat made of its fur for you,
       each hair some creamy comment about the weather:
here is a blue sky, warmed by manmade drought.
       Here is a mountain you can climb to see
just some of what’s been stolen. My love,
       I’d give you nothing if it wasn’t also ruined,
if it wasn’t its own long history of lack. I’d put my hand
       in yours, if only its bones and tendons
weren’t brought to you by so much more than devotion:
       theft and injury, centuries of trespass,
the wallop of our humanity on a breakable earth.

*

To the Man Who Could Shoot Me and Get Away With It

When I first realized I was a pacifist—I was a teenager—
a great mentor I didn’t have at the time told me,

you should learn how to be hated by the ones you love most.
It wasn’t terrible advice. I might’ve held it in my mind

awkwardly, the way I hold my husband’s Kevlar now
when he hands it to me between deployments,

sorting through our basement, saying, here, hold this,
and because my instinct is to reach for what needs holding,

I do. Maybe getting away with what we do in this life
is the worst that could happen. Maybe to be furious is to love.

A friend recently asked me why I thought men
had so much power. I offered the only truth I had:

because they’ll kill their children for it. I grew up to become a poet
with pronouns in my bio. Pacifism is more labor-intensive than war.

A mentor I really did have once told me, a poem isn’t a poem
unless it’s hurting someone. I thought about how the sun

can’t love anything constantly without killing it, unless
what it loves can figure out how to shield itself,

how to be loved from the safety of millions of miles away.
The sun is probably just as interested in survival as the earth.

A now-dead man-poet once told his now-dead woman-student
to make every poem her last poem, like she hadn’t already,

like we aren’t all being shot at by systems constructed
just for him. I would like every worm I’ve ever stepped over

to go back underground and tell that dead man-poet
I am no longer writing my last poems. I can only write

beginnings. See, I’m ending this one with a seed
no bigger than the sound of your name being called

from another room. You stop to listen. Who was it, calling?
Is there something you can do? If you hear it again, you’ll answer.

*

Hearing Test

I sit in a booth with the single-button clicker
in my hand and think about whether my husband
       would or would not get a kick out of this:
me, ears muffed, listening to an artificial man’s voice
tell me what to say, and I actually say it. Say cowboy.
       Cowboy. Say airplane. Airplane. At no point
does the man ask me to name what I hear
around his voice: the sound of birds flying far away
       from where I am, the sound of two eyes rolling,
the sound of the ocean if the ocean quit its storms
and married itself to carrying a man’s voice
       across it on a precious shell. Say shift. Shift. Say take.
Take. Here’s an example: the men behind AI
want to answer my emails using my voice.
       When I am asked to teach a workshop,
the men behind AI suggest I call myself definitely interested.
The only thing I am definitely interested in
       is the location of my voice: my throat, my skull,
my hands. It cannot survive elsewhere.
The audiologist discovers a small rock garden
       growing in each of my ear canals, which she describes
as petite, in a not-good way. My laugh is either
a gunshot or a car backfiring. Say hot dog. Hot dog.
       Say mousetrap. Mousetrap. The fluid that should be
where my rock gardens are can, in some people,
become so salty it crystalizes, which explains why
       solid ground feels like the surface of the ocean to me.
When I explain this to my mother, she brightens
and says, does this mean you are—what is it? a salty bitch?
       Everything my mother knows about profanity
she has heard from me. I gaze at her and shine,
a star and its moon, a river learning to swim in the sea.
       And even though I’m more of a dick
than a salty bitch, I hug her, tell her I’m proud of her,
and we listen to the sound of knowing
       the noises our voices make have been heard.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and was released by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. For now, they live in the Pacific Northwest and teach writing to military officers.

Three Poems by Ann Kammerer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Robin

We sat around
my kitchen table,
my brothers in town
for Christmas,
Mom and Dad
long divorced
and dead
for decades.

They talked about
high school.
They talked about
sports.
They talked about
being All-Region
in baseball,
and how
they could’ve been
All-State,
if only Mom
had married
someone else.

“We would’ve
been better,” Freddie said.

“Yeah,” Charlie said.
“We would’ve been
All-Stars.”

Charlie drank.
Freddie smoked.
They went
back and forth
calling Mom an idiot
for not marrying
a college player
named Robin Roberts,
a stand-out pitcher
recruited by the Phillies
and enshrined
in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“She dated him you know.”
Charlie leaned in,
his head tipped,
his eyebrows raised
just like Dad
used to do
when he tried
to make a point.

“I doubt it,” I said.
“Like Mom made
things up.
You know.
To get Dad mad.”

Freddie leaned in, too,
his jaw squared.

“She wouldn’t lie
‘bout that.” he said.

Charlie nodded.
He rapped the table
with his knuckles.

“Yeah,” he said.
“She wouldn’t do that.
Never.”

They fixed
on each other,
their eyes wide.

“Yeah,” Freddie said.
“It could’ve been perfect.”

Reseating their baseball caps,
they listed the keepsakes
they found tucked away
in Mom’s dresser drawer,
the college programs
with Roberts’ name underlined,
the ’49 rookie card,
the mint condition
Topps and Bowmans,
and the ‘53 baseball mag,
with “Wonder Boy” Roberts
on the color cover,
sizing up his pitch.

“She had
everything,” Freddie said.
“All his cards,
all those stories,
all those things
about him,
about his kids,
about his wife.”

Freddie paused.
He blinked and looked
out the window.

“Like that could’ve
been us,” Charlie said.
“Imagine it.”

Chugging their beers,
they opened two more,
saying they could’ve had
a star-quality Dad,
someone who taught them
how to throw,
catch, and hit,
someone who
coached them,
instead of a dad
in worn suits
and scuffed wingtips
who never even
tossed them a pitch
when they played ball
with neighbor kids
in a fenced back yard.

*

Curation

Mom needed money.
Dad wouldn’t give
her any.
He said she spent
whatever she got
on stupid things
instead of what
she should.

Her friend Charlotte
told her to have
a garage sale.
She said Mom
would be surprised
at how much money
she could make.

“People like to buy
other people’s junk,” she said.
“I’m sure your husband
has a lot of it.”

Mom emptied cupboards
and rummaged through
dresser drawers.
She pillaged closets
and dug deep
into crannies
and crawl spaces.
She gathered anything
deemed useless
or useful,
not caring
whose it was,
just as long
as it would sell.

“No one’s gonna miss
this stuff,” she said.
“Especially your brothers.”

Freddie and Charlie
had moved out
the summer I finished
seventh grade,
getting an apartment
and taking college classes,
vying to avoid
the Vietnam draft.
They left stuff behind,
their closets jammed,
saying they’d come get things,
as soon as they were ready.

“If they wanted
this crap so bad
they would’ve taken it,” Mom said.
“Finders Keepers, right?”

We cleared their closets
and set things on
the scuffed plank floor,
creating a line-up
of boxes and bags.

Mom split the tape
and opened
a small cardboard box
labeled “CHARLIE’S CARDS.”

“Well looky here.”
Her eyes reflected
a colorful collection
of rectangular cards,
the ones paid for
with nickels and dimes,
originally packaged
with a stale stick
of pink powdery gum.

“I betcha there’s
a Mickey Mantle
in here,” Mom said.
“Or a Willie Mays.”

She held up each card,
looking for bends
or worn edges,
making stacks
of MVPs,
sluggers,
and pitchers,
a few catchers
in between.
Lopsided frowns
crossed her face
as she discarded
dispelled prospects
and hopefuls
in a jumbled pile.

“Help me,” she said.
“Let’s see
what we got.”

I set down my Coke
and stood beside her,
a light breeze
carrying the roar
of the distant highway.
Our fingers nimble,
our eyes fixed,
we worked in sync,
silently sorting
the cardboard portraits,
a curated gallery
of young men
in pinstripes
and ball caps,
poised on green fields
against the bluest of skies.

*

Rookie

My brother Charlie
got fired from his sales job
after getting too drunk
at a Christmas party
and spouting off.

“My boss had it
in for me,” he said.
“Everyone says
it’s bullshit.”

Charlie sat around
for a month.
He went to bars
and sat around
some more.
He got drunk
and called me
all the time,
ranting about
his ex-wife,
ranting about
some college girl
he picked up,
calling her a slut.

“I don’t want
to hear it,” I said.

Charlie got foul mouthed.
I hung up.
He called back.

“Hey.
Listen to me,” he said.
You’re supposed
to be my sister.”

I hung up again.
He kept calling back.
I turned off the phone.

Six months later,
Charlie ran out
of money,
his prospects dry,
his savings thin.
His phone got
disconnected
so I went by his house,
the lawn overgrown,
the front door
kicked in.

I found him
in the back room
sunk in a vinyl recliner,
ringed by beer cans,
empty chip bags,
and crusted-over bowls
of beans and franks.

“Why you here?”
Charlie stared
at an ancient TV
coated with dust.
“The Tigers,” he said.
“They’re on.”

A sour smell
hung in the air,
the carpet squishy
beneath my feet.
I pulled over
a folding chair
and sat for a minute
on the torn sticky seat,
asking how he was.

He lifted his filthy ball cap
and smoothed his
gray-blonde hair,
his skin sallow
with tungsten light.

“Doing good,” he said.
He dunked his hand
in a Styrofoam cooler
filled with melting ice
and Miller Light.
“You know, though,
I still can’t believe it.”

He looked at me
and shook his head.
I asked him what.

“You know what.”
Charlie slurred,
starting in again
about his baseball cards,
how he could’ve
cashed them in,
been rich,
if only Mom
hadn’t sold them
at that garage sale
years ago
when he was away
at college.

“Man oh man,” he said.
“Mickey Mantle.
Rod Carew.
Hank Aaron.
Plus all those
rookie cards.
Goddamn her.”

Charlie picked
at the cracked vinyl
on the arms of his chair.
He bit his dry lip
and said yepper yep,
once, then twice.

“Goddamn it.”
Rising in his seat,
his eyes blistering,
Charlie threw his beer
as a Tiger struck out,
ending the inning
one run behind,
with two men stranded
on base.

*

Ann Kammerer lives in the Chicago area, having relocated from her home state of Michigan. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are coming in Fictive Dream, One Art, Open Arts Forum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Major 7th Magazine, Workers Write!, Chiron Review, Thoughtful Dog, and Ekphrastic Review, and in anthologies by Crow Woods Publishing and Querencia Press. Her chapbook collections of narrative poetry include “Yesterday’s Playlist” (Bottlecap Press, 2023), “Beaut” (Kelsay Books, 2024), “Friends Once There” (Impspired, 2024), and “Someone Else” (Bottlecap Press, 2024). You can find her here: annkammerer.com

What has Become of the First Marriage by Carolynn Kingyens

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

What has Become of the First Marriage

Whenever I see a mature-looking couple,
between early-to-mid sixties,
walking hand-in-hand with that obnoxious
look of late, middle age love,
I immediately know, stronger
than suspicion, that this is a second marriage,
possibly, a third.

Their bodies, still spry,
with the exception of their backs
now weary and slightly leaning
into the semblance
of a cursive C.

It’s at the garish, fluorescent-lit diner,
known for their early bird specials,
where I spot them next;
sitting side-by-side in the same
maroon-colored polyurethane-pleather
booth reminding me, for a moment,
of that yellow-tinged photograph
from a history book
back in middle school
of a pioneering couple,
sitting side-by-side as the husband
mans a dust-covered wagon
while his wife holds a long,
double barrel shotgun
across her lap during the era
of the California Gold Rush.

I ponder, wondering why
they just can’t sit across
from each other like the rest
of us disgruntled, cynical couples
well-seasoned in realism and romance,
knowing full well the value
of separate booths and bedrooms;
the value of personal space.

Perhaps we can blame it on
raising multiple children
notwithstanding the later care
of elderly parents
before the unexpected crash
and subsequent depletion
of your Roth IRA and 401K,
and our failure to launch,
rage-filled man-child, who’d turn us
prematurely gray in our thirties,
and who still keeps us
up at night with endless worry.

This is the kind of tumult
that depletes and desolates
first marriages into abysmal
shreds.

It’s as if some imaginary, sci-fi
vortex has sucked every
ounce of lust and desire
clean from the depths
of our loins, leaving our love
cagey and bone-dry.

Now when you reach out
your retired, manicured
hand across the tabletop;
across the universe;
it feels oddly foreign
and cold as a dead fish
with that thousand-yard
glaucoma-cloudy gaze,
finally yielding to its fate.

*

Carolynn Kingyens was born and raised in Northeast Philadelphia. She is the author of two poetry collections, BEFORE THE BIG BANG MAKES A SOUND and Coupling, both published by Kelsay Books. In addition to poetry, she writes short fiction and narrative essays. Two of her short stories were selected for Best of Fiction 2021 and 2023 by Across the Margin, a Brooklyn arts & culture webzine. The audio version of the stories are available on Apple Podcasts and on Spotify. And two of her essays, “There’s A Tiffany In Every Dysfunctional Family” (about the youngest sister of David and Amy Sedaris) and “How Creative Resilience Saved Me From Childhood Trauma” were recently republished by YourTango, a large, female-led NYC publisher. You can read some of her narrative essays on Medium, where she dives into a myriad of topics from The Royal Family to true crime.

Retrospective by Ace Boggess

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Retrospective

You needed a normal life; I needed attention—
both of us negligent drivers of intersecting cars,
adjusting radio knobs as one light reddens,
another greens. I couldn’t build a stable base
with sunlit gardens, a shade tree at one corner
of the property; I kept a cluttered junkyard in me,
flash-mobbed by rats & wild dogs.

You needed a normal life; I needed something
intangible like success or universal love.
I was a snow globe shattered on the street, & you,
you worked each job until it broke you more,
then moved on to the next, leaving you little time
to observe my fragments.

You needed children; I needed to be taught
the rate of decay of hope. I was a grocer who dreams, &
you were a shopper demanding to get your vegetables
scanned. I couldn’t place your produce in a sack
without reciting Shakespeare in dramatic pauses, &
you, who already heard soliloquies of tragic men,
didn’t see yourself waiting for the curtain.

*

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, most recently Escape Envy. His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes, watches Criterion films, and tries to stay out of trouble. His forthcoming books include poetry collections, My Pandemic / Gratitude List from Mōtus Audāx Press and Tell Us How to Live from Fernwood Press, and his first short-story collection, Always One Mistake, from Running Wild Press.

Two Poems by Tere Sievers

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Left Behind

One of us will stay,
the other will leave.
If you are first, I will hold
your knitted cap and red cup
to feel a trace of you.

If it’s me first,
what will you hold–
handles on the soup pot?
trowel from the garden?
the empty ring
from my finger?

*

Before You Are Gone I Miss You

I miss your half asleep voice
in the morning,
the pull of the blanket
as you get out of bed,
your shoelaces snapping
on the hardwood floor,
the half smile on your face
that isn’t a smile.
Each time you walk
out the door I miss
the tips of our fingers
touching in a long goodbye,
the feel of my hand
on the back of your sweater.

*

Tere Sievers lives in Long Beach California with her husband and four chickens and teaches in the OLLI program at CSULB. She attends a weekly poetry workshop run by her friend and gifted poet, Donna Hilbert. In that place she has learned to see clearly the joys of a long life as well as how to survive its losses. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, Picture Show Press and others.

Broken Wishbone by Steven Concert

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Broken Wishbone

The sum total of everything
brought you to me. We used

to break wishbones together.
Each time you let me win,

knew my wish would
be for us, not me,

and the happiness
of a lifetime together.

Two haiku, we were the words
that made it to the page,

and together we were divisible
only by the nothing that remained.

*

Steven Concert, gay American poet, resides in northeastern Pennsylvania. In June, Steven was elected 1st Vice President of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. His work has been published by Discretionary Love, Agates, Common Threads, Cracked Walnut, and Mad Poets Society. Steven can be found on Facebook @ Paperless Poets.

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

Ode to the rainstorms that keep my friends close by M.J. Young

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Ode to the rainstorms that keep my friends close

Bless my friends
who, when I came
out to them, said
deadass not because
they didn’t believe
me but because
I had finally said
I’m gay, bless
their hooting after
I confirmed
with my own deadass
even though I don’t
like using profanity
but their happiness
overpowered my guilt
so it was okay
even if
the librarians inside
were wondering why
five young
twenty-somethings
were huddled under
the covered patio
in the butterfly garden
when it’s raining
so thickly, laughing,
but it wasn’t as if it
was raining
when we got there
and when it started
to rain we figured
that it would stop
in a few minutes
because it’s summer
and the rains
are usually frequent
but quick,
spits, as my mother
says, but I don’t
because it reminds
me of having saliva
in my face
and the accompanying
words I’d rather forget
and I’d rather be happy
when thinking about
the little dash
of summer rain
we’re gifted, laugh
with my friends
who were scrambling
to pick up the pieces
of our board game
as the wind tried to
claim them for itself,
me hugging
a copy of The Goldfinch
to my chest
because even though
I wondered
if Tartt would make
Theo canonically gay
or bi or something
before remembering
that this book was popular
so that wouldn’t happen
I still like
her writing style
and besides,
I was with my friends
so who cares about
Theo who doesn’t
even exist
when the wind
made us hysterical
in a giddy way
because in that
moment
the most important thing
was to make sure
that none of
the character
or room or
weapon cards
or score sheets
got too wet or were taken
by the wind
which was a nice worry
to have
compared to everything
it is we were dealing
with on our own,
but under the patio
in the middle of
the butterfly garden
walled in by the rain
that smalled
our worlds,
we could laugh
with each other
and not look past
the problem
of getting out
of the rain unwetted.

*

M.J. Young is a writer and MFA student at Florida International University. His poetry can be found in Vagabond City Lit, Stone of Madness Press, and more. In his free time he enjoys listening to Philip Glass and exploring bookstores. He can be found on Instagram @mjyoungwrites.

Spelling Things Out by Elaine Sorrentino

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Spelling Things Out

It was a liberating Scrabble game;
she loved me, this woman who was my mother
yet not my mother,

soothing her burdened heart with a sip of gimlet
she confesses I cannot believe my son
does not want his little piece of the sod,

and as she places the tiles for ABSOLVE
on the triple word score, for 45 points,
her surprising instructions set me free,

If you find someone
who makes you happier than my son,
go with him.

*

Elaine Sorrentino is Communications Director at South Shore Conservatory in Hingham, MA. Her work has been published in Minerva Rising, Willawaw Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Global Poemic, The Writers’ Magazine, Haiku Universe, Failed Haiku, and has won the monthly poetry challenge at wildamorris.blogspot.com.