One Sentence Poems
April 2025: lithium
This journal is intended to be read as an issue. Please consider starting here.
Dear Readers and Contributors,
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"We create in order to reconstruct meaning out of the chaos of life."
— Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage.
The editors are grateful to all who submitted to this issue and congratulate all whose work appears here. My love and thanks to c0-editors Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Natalie Wolf, and Clare Rolens.
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Yours,
Dale
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Use the pencil
icon to move
through the issue.
Cynthia Pitman
Ghost
Lately I feel as if
I'm not here,
for when small talk erupts,
I hover between the lines,
and when I leave a place,
I leave behind no empty space,
as the air folds in on itself
behind me, like water,
so that no trace is left behind,
no carcass for casual
carnivores to pick clean
behind the scenes,
not even an ethereal mist
or a random memory.
Cynthia Pitman, author of The White Room, Blood Orange, and Breathe, has been published in Amethyst, Ekphrastic, Adelaide, Third Wednesday, Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art (Pushcart Prize nominee) and others.
Tom Busillo
Once Glimpsed
You trace the story of a leaf
making its way back into the tree
and say one day we’ll be shining
in an unlikely place
where the faces of roses are
the mother tongue, where we’ll
trade sighs and stretch, where
we are silver in the moonlight
and the moon’s never left,
in a place where there was once a fire
on the lake, where the air is trying
to decide where its roots lay, where a stray
touch won’t give us away, where every house
has an open door, and we’ll wander as bodies
sure of their cure.
Living in Philadelphia, PA, Tom Busillo likes playing acoustic guitar and attempting to sing Leonard Cohen, the Magnetic Fields, or any song he can transpose into a baritone before butchering it
Erica Wheadon
Lithium
The beige pill—the failsafe, the kill
switch, the deadening of impulses.
Erica Wheadon is an Australian writer and artist. She holds an M.A in Writing & Literature from Deakin University, and her work has been featured in numerous journals, anthologies and poetry festivals. Find her at www.ericawheadon.com.
Amanda Weir-Gertzog
Catherine Wheel
Cracks in the wheel
keep me from turning
and all the windows
only show me night.
Shortly after accepting this poem, Amanda Weir-Gertzog, who lives in Durham, North Carolina, joined our editorial team so she now can use our dental plan, although we specifically advise against it.
Susan Knezel Reardon
A Moment in the Waiting Room
Her skinny boy,
folded over himself,
gray folding chair
holding him up,
slides his head over
off his own lap
to hers, while she,
forgetting herself,
her hands in his hair
crumpling it up,
gives her heart over,
pulls him in closer,
matching his breath
with hers.
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Susan Knezel Reardon is a teacher of autistic preschoolers whose first poetic crushes were e.e. cummings and Emily Dickinson.
Matthew Caretti
Like Water
In my next life
I want to be a cloud,
something modest
like the low wisps
sweeping in before
the eye of the storm,
or the humble cirrus
leftover fish scales
marking a turn to fair
weather—to embody
change and sensible
movement, to accumulate
with the cumulous, to
cycle back as rain.
As an English teacher, Matthew Caretti spends a good bit of time pondering what it means to compose a sound sentence, which, he thinks, is to make it poetry.
Virginia LeBaron
Love Poem for Second Marriages
You have called me her name only twice—
remarkable, really,
your mouth so long shaped
by that word.
Virginia LeBaron is a nurse and a poet and her writing is inspired, in part, by her experiences caring for patients with cancer. We just published another of Virginia's poems on The Scarred Tree.
Gloria Heffernan
Just Before Dawn
If I could be awake
for only one hour a day,
it would be this one,
right on the brink of dawn
when the sky blooms
from black to blue,
and Venus shines
brilliant and still
above the horizon
like the diamond earring
I lost in the snow
and thought I would
never see again.
Gloria Heffernan has three published collections and invites you to visit her website at: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.
Howie Good
Little Birds
Sometimes, in the stillness of the early morning hours,
when the streets and highways are their most empty,
and the swelling sun bulges over the line of the horizon,
waking little birds, the cell phone was never invented.
Howie Good's latest poetry collection, Akimbo, is available from Berlin-based publisher Sacred Parasite. Dale Wisely is out here saying it may be his best. Which is saying a lot.
B. Fulton Jennes
Tithe
When the box of tithing envelopes was near-empty,
we knew it was time for Reverend Ammerman
to pull his dour Lincoln into our driveway,
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duck out of the car and unfold to his full
height, gangly as Lincoln, dark, morose,
big hands patting his pockets for wallet and keys,
then tromp to the porch in his black wingtips,
big as bloated carp, our mother hurrying
to take his coat, feigning joy, gushing Oh, Pastor,
if only you’d called, I’d have baked something,
inviting him into our unkemptness, the dog
sniffing his pant leg and curling a lip,
we three fleeing like demons from holy water
to listen to his droning baritone from afar
before Mom chirped let me talk to Bill, Pastor,
her voice oozing an urgency to fetch his coat,
send him to back out of our blind driveway
while she banged pots in the kitchen, all of us
knowing that, come Sunday, we’d sidle into the pew
in front of Helen and Charlie Sager, smile and nod
to them in their Sunday best, then settle in
to wonder if our thin, sad envelope would rocket
our prayers to heaven like bubbles rising through
ginger ale, aimed to burst in the face of God.
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B. Fulton Jennes is an award-winning poet whose collections include Blinded Birds, winner of the 2022 International Book Award, and FLOWN (Porkbelly Press, 2024). Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT.
One Sentence Poems
is edited by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Clare Rolens, Dale Wisely, and Natalie Wolf. It is an Ambidextrous Bloodhound publication. Thanks for reading!