One Sentence Poems
December 2024: how to break it
Chris Bullard
Nancy Cherico
M F Drummy
Hallie Fogarty
Dagne Forrest
Samuel Lorraine Goldsmith
Gary Grossman
D.R. James
J.I. Kleinberg​
Steve Klepetar
​Richard L. Matta
Corey Mesler
Amy Miller
Nancy Kay Peterson
Tracy Royce
J.R. Solonche
M. Brooke Wiese
Paul Willis
Tarn Wilson
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Photo by Jossuha Théophile on Unsplash. remixed by D.Wisely
This journal is intended to be read as an issue. Please consider starting here.
Dear Readers and Contributors,
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Here's my plan. Express love, receive love. Recognize when a thing is wrong and hurtful and resist that thing. Create art when I can and appreciate it at all times. We will learn to recognize each other and know when we are in the presence of our brothers and sisters.
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Your editors are grateful to all who submitted to this issue and congratulate all whose work appears here. My love and thanks to my hard-working c0-editors Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Natalie Wolf, and Clare Rolens.
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Yours,
Dale
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M F Drummy
Grief
Elegant syllable,
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you are the seed of sadness,
well-oiled engine of despair,
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tongue of thorns,
broken nest from which
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the robin’s egg drops to the ground,
that gravity of nothingness,
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of memory, emptied,
overflowing with choking,
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purpled vines,
a home for wayward dreams,
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pride’s needle inserted through the heart,
blemish in cement,
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the poet’s unholy companion,
silver pinwheel of guilt
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spinning in the wind,
patient, nocturnal wolf
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lurking at love’s door,
and here, on the cusp of
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my eighth decade,
I have discovered something about myself:
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I will do anything to keep you from breaking in.
When not living inside his poems, M F Drummy and his way cool life partner of over 20 years enjoy splitting their time between the Colorado Rockies and the rest of the planet.
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Corey Mesler
At Pickleball
Today I chased a wild ball
that almost landed in Wonderland
and I sent it back so high
and fevered that when it dropped
into the far corner of the court
my opponents left and returned
to jobs they gave up years ago:
bankers, physicians, left-fielders and gigolos.
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Lunch Ticket, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South, and he has published over 45 books of fiction and poetry.
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Corey Mesler
How
One by one
the children rise
and walk away
from us
into adulthood
and the
neighborhoods
beyond the
tallest mountains.
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Lunch Ticket, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South, and he has published over 45 books of fiction and poetry.
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Nancy Cherico
Floating Down Eden
When you open
your refrigerator door
to find meat as warm
as a late summer morning
and what used to be ice
now a shallow puddle,
your kitchen chair
loses its balance,
your left ankle turns
and your heart
has already been broken
more than once,
you sit down, sigh,
and contemplate entropy.
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Nancy Cherico's poetry is sometimes humorous, sometimes sorrowful and always for the reader.
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J.I. Kleinberg
What he said
Gaze drifting
over her left shoulder
his eyes slant back
toward her cheek
and he lifts
the corner of his mouth
in that way
he makes the dimple,
raises pairs of fingers
to scoop quotes
open and closed
in the smoky air
and says,
when I said first
when I said you
yes us best only
when I said love
I was speaking metaphorically.
J.I. Kleinberg wrangles words in Bellingham, Washington, USA, on Instagram @jikleinberg, and in print and online journals, anthologies, and chapbooks worldwide.
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J.R. Solonche
You Said the Reading
You said the reading
was “Extraordinary,”
and I am glad that it was,
but I’m surprised because
I’ve read the poems he read,
and they are ordinary, just
ordinary poems lying there
on the page, supine, eyes
closed, breathing through
the mouth, barely awake,
too weak to sit up straight.
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Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
Steve Klepetar
October 2023
When you look out the window,
see the sky filled with rain,
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when the street almost disappears
beneath a rippling gray mass,
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when birds hurl themselves
from brittle leaves,
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and everyone has gone,
everyone has turned to stone,
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when every song you hear
reminds you of thunder,
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when wheels roll through
waves, and wind
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lashes your roof, when you fail
to complete a single thought
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as day stretches on into broken night,
it’s then the radio goes silent,
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and weeping feels the same as breath.
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Steve Klepetar has begun to dream in one sentence poems, which spill from dream trees in little rivulets of gold.
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Richard L. Matta
Accountability
It's as if I'm seeing her again in the wave who raises its brow,
then quickly curls its lips, snarls and spits, turns at the waist,
snaps and pounds, then slumps like it never happened, and
in that moment, I wonder if wind forgets how it shapes
the sea, how wind like words, is energy, how a ripple
a thousand miles away moves silently, builds energy,
creates tsunamis.
Richard L. Matta is originally from New York's Hudson Valley, now lives in San Diego, California, and when not chauffeur to his golden-doodle dog, he makes time to dabble in various forms of poetry.
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Dagne Forrest
Barehanded
Catching a fish in your bare hands
at twelve one of those never-again moments,
reflected glory from the shared memory
persisting in the intervening years
between us, trying to grasp the thing of it
more elusive than the slick arc of muscle
of the Northern Pike you gripped
thrillingly for a few short breaths
before releasing it back
into the shaded depths under the bridge.
Dagne Forrest is a Canadian poet who loves the idea of living by Strunk’s guidance to “Omit needless words”, but sometimes forgets.
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M. Brooke Wiese
I Need You Like a Hole in the Head
We were lucky to get out alive
from where we hid in the trunk
of your father’s second wife’s prized
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white Corvette convertible that the bank
took back later but by then we
were long gone, young and punch-drunk
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with crazy love, adulting in a somewhat twee
abode full of knickknacks and tchotchkes, a rental we found
in a week-old paper between the settee
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cushions in the lobby of a swank hotel with round
king beds and gold-colored spigots
that we only knew from the picture postcards we obtained
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in the lobby bathroom near where profligates
sat with jiggling knees, watched by hotel personnel
while we admired the city-themed trinkets
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from either side of the plexiglass carousel,
your eyes through the scratched acrylic, my deep well.
M. Brooke Wiese likes to write poems in traditional forms in a contemporary voice, and currently teaches English at a special education inclusive school in New York City to high school students of all abilities.
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D. R. James
At the Coffee Shop
Outside, a window washer watches
me watching him, works his rhythm,
window after window, simulating a
seamlessness, tipping his squeegee
after every-other downward stroke,
coercing the water to run like blood
from each overlapping pass, though
of course he can’t touch my shining
smudges, the smeared prints inside,
five-eighths of a glinting inch away.
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D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan, and his latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres 2021).​
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Amy Miller
Lemon
The cake was much too sweet and I hate
everything lemon, but you found the recipe
and infused, drizzled, powdered, your face
bright in the telling as you passed out pieces
and gave me one to take home that I’ll
never want, but I’ll always remember
how your eyes closed at the taste.
Amy Miller lives in Oregon, where she writes books like Astronauts, Rough House, and The Trouble with New England Girls and works about 11 days a week. https://writers-island.blogspot.com/
Chris Bullard
Reality
We’re watching an old movie
on TV, one with a dead parent
warning his children of some
coming apocalypse, when Jan
asks me, not whether I believe
in ghosts (I don’t), but whether
I believe she saw a ghost, a sort
of different question altogether,
the background being that she
came upon one in the house
she took when I accepted a job
in a city so far away it seemed
like flying through the afterlife
to get there although I was
visiting on the day she reeled
up the stairs and described
a woman like light and dust,
who glared at her, a solid
form as real to her as I was
and though I danced around
the issue then, it’s in my face
now from the person I trust most
in the world, so I say, “Sure,”
just to be reassuring, but I think
it was probably a trick of the eye
that caused the illusion of something
because there’s always another
explanation for things that startle
you, everything being a matter
of context and interpretation,
so even if the person telling you
some fact that she swears
is as true as God’s own word
and you know her to be honest,
you might doubt what happened,
just as I question whether I was
ever as cruel to her as she says.
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Chris Bullard is a retired judge who lives in Philadelphia, PA.
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Gary Grossman
Twelve Ounce Dark Roast
An abstract etching of
small white ridges
rose from her left forearm
whispering "Say nothing
more than thank
you, for the coffee."
Gary Grossman's writing appears in 54 literary reviews and his poetry books Lyrical Years (Kelsay), and What I Meant to Say Was… (Impspired) and graphic memoir My Life in Fish—One Scientist’s Journey (Impspired) are available from Amazon.
Nancy Kay Peterson
Foraging for Morels
After the first
damp, warm spring night,
when heavy morning air
hugs sun-dappled
southern slopes,
in the detritus
at dead elms' feet,
they emerge --
black, grey or yellow,
at first hard to spot,
but once one is seen,
the eye is trained
to find more treasures
to be plucked, bagged,
carried home, washed,
halved lengthwise
and sautéed in pure
butter with garlic salt,
‘til shriveled and blackened,
and speared fresh from the pan
trembling on a wooden toothpick,
they offer a taste
of earth itself,
a wealth
like no other.
Nancy Kay Peterson forages for morels but otherwise relies on the convenience of traditional grocery stores.
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!