One Sentence Poems
June 2024: sky of one star
Allan Lake
Amanda Weir-Gertzog
Colm O’Shea
Corey Mesler
H. Russell Smith
J. I. Kleinberg
Jennifer Browne
Jim Kacian
John Hawkhead
Juan Mobili
Krista Carson
Leslie Hodge
Linden Van Wert
Mi-Seong Kong
Mykyta Ryzhykh
Robin Dellabough
Ryan Brennan
Sandra St-Laurent
Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta
Steve Klepetar
Photo by Warren, via Unsplash, remixed by D.Wisely
This journal is intended to be read as an issue. Please consider starting here.
If you've done any editing of literary journals you may have had occasion to think, wow, I'm not crazy about the poems, but the bio is fantastic.
This issue is full of poems we are crazy about. But I beg you: Don't fail to read these bios.
Indulge me a bit when I say that I'm particularly proud of this issue. I'd say what it is about all these poems that moves me but I can't, for the same reason I'm terrible at writing blurbs. Whenever I'm asked to write one, I have to fight off the temptation to write "This collection of poems is so awesome I don't even know what to tell you."
I hope you love these poems as much as I do.
Your editors are grateful to all who submitted to this issue and congratulate all whose work appears here. My thanks to my hard-working c0-editors Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Natalie Wolf, and Clare Rolens. How great are they? These editors are so awesome I don't even know what to tell you.
​
Yours,
Dale
​
​
Use the pencil
icon to move
through the issue.
Next
Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta
Heart Replacement Prescribed
The rickety gate
creaks open
and in comes
a stray I've fed
for two winters
without ever letting
myself call it
my pet,
lest
I overwrite
the memory of one
I grieve still
even as I hide
this bottomless
survivor's guilt.
​
Sankara Jayanth Sudanagunta is a multidisciplinary artist from Hyderabad, India trying to center his mind through his art in an increasingly chaotic world.
​
Corey Mesler
The Mundane
Like food, like the
hum of the tree
as you approach:
​
these things mark
us here, keep us
connected to the
​
only truth, the mundane,
the stars up above,
the stars in our blood.
​
The Wind
I stand in the same
wind she
stands in
miles away,
forgetting me.
Corey Mesler is a writer, reader, pickleball player, bookstore owner and moviegoer living, if you call this living, in Memphis.
​
Steve Klepetar
Blue Note
Your song in the night, blue note
penetrating dark trees,
and I listened as moonlight inflamed clouds
​
above the high school
with its spike-crowned gates and tall fence,
cinder track ringing the baseball field,
​
silent cars hunched along 111th street,
while shadow cats
clawed each other bloody beneath the fire escapes.
​
​
Steve Klepetar has a tee shirt that reads "I (picture of an insect) Kafka."
​
The Sweater That Was Much Too Big
Give it away, you said, but when I pulled it
over my head, the cold nearly jolted me
to the green bench, where you held my hand,
fed me nonpareils until my teeth ached
and I asked you to marry me while a military band
belted out Come All Ye Faithful as a twelve bar blues.
Robin Dellabough
Metallurgy
When your mother tells you about her first date
in thirty–seven years, the air you inhale
is sharper, stuck in your throat,
and when, tickly and pink as a newborn,
she tells you that he’s widowed and runs a body shop,
you can’t help seeing him in goggles,
holding a blowtorch, hammering her dents
from inside out until smooth shiny metal
curls around her rebuilt engine, good as new,
so when you consider them lying naked together,
their courage a stunning blanket,
their greening bed, greening selves,
you remember you didn’t ask his name.
​
Robin Dellabough is a poet and writer with a journalism master’s degree. Her debut collection, Double Helix (2022) includes a Pushcart Prize-nominated poem. Recent poems in Rattle, Mom Egg Review, Blue Unicorn and many more.
​
Leslie Hodge
Needs killing, granny said, showing her seed-pearl teeth, and before that
I stood at the sink scrubbing the skillet, well water faintly reeking
of sulfur, and before that we pulled the kitchen table away
from the wall, so the men could eat first, and before
that she sent me to the garden tucked between
the henhouse and barn for a tomato, and
before that Mickey-the-Dog started
his shovel-headed barking.
Leslie Hodge enjoys experimenting with forms, and loves to add poems to her website, www.lesliehodgepoet.com.
​
Sandra St-Laurent
Ragnarök
I dreamed of Iceland again
giving my mind the permission
to snuggle in the woolen folds
of a knitted herds of sheep
as the lava flushes
my worries to ashes,
floating little pieces
of eco-anxiety
once embedded in ice,
now exposed
and revealing,
too late or too soon,
the end
of (our) time.
​
Sandra St-Laurent is contemplating getting inked and is leaning towards an octopus tattoo for its three hearts (one French, one English, one for poetry).
​
Jim Kacian
So which do you believe, the sky of one star, or the sky of many?
​
Jim Kacian is founder/president of The Haiku Foundation, founder/owner of Red Moon Press, editor-in-chief of Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W. W. Norton, 2013) and author of a score of books of poetry, mainly haiku.
​
Juan Mobili
The Crow's Gift
My father loved words that did not come easy
the ones that did not open like trained roses,
​
the gift of his crow: when to swoop upon
and when to wait on a high branch,
​
make sure that hunger never clouded his vision.
​
Born in Buenos Aires, adopted by New York. Juan Mobili is still betting on poetry to unlock hearts, still striving to write better.
​
Linden Van Wert
Curious
looking at me, you stir our tea
with the earpiece of your glasses
​
like an oar
sculling to pause a boat’s movement
​
like a wet brush
mixing pigments in a little pan
​
like a scientist
combining chemicals in an experiment
​
like a cook
as a sauce is thickening
​
like an actor
demonstrating a creative thought
​
like a cat
dipping a paw into the fishbowl
​
like a bathing connoisseur
testing the bathwater’s temperature
​
like a comedian
signaling a joke to follow
​
like a flirt
trailing a hand in water from the boat
​
like a long curved finger
as if exploring the sugar crystals
​
now at the bottom of my cup
a private world
​
in which your interest
is completely
​
improper.
​
Linden Van Wert is delighted about not having to mention successful submissions in her bio, leaving you to wonder if they exist at all, especially now that the allotted thirty-five words have all been used.
​
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!
