One Sentence Poems
November 2023: All We Have
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Photo by Alexandra
This journal is intended to be read as an issue. Please consider starting here.
When Robert Scotellaro and I founded One Sentence Poems as a spin-off from Right Hand Pointing (a process almost identical to the spinning-off of Rhoda from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, including appearances by Carlton, the alcoholic doorman in Rhoda's building) we set it up as a blog-style website publishing one poem at a time. That continued for 9 years until summer 2023 when, for reasons no one has been able to explain to me, I decided, as show runner, to recklessly impose a summer hiatus, leaving the editors without dental insurance, which has long been the only perk offered to our volunteer editors of all the publications put out by the literary juggernaut, Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press. The plan all along, which I had registered as a flight plan with the FAA, once again getting confused by the demands of bureaucracy, was to start up again in November as a twice per year issue-based publication. (Twice a year, as we all know, either is biannual, semiannual, or both.) So here you go.
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I am grateful to all who submitted to this first issue and congratulate all whose fine work appears here. My thanks to our hard-working editors who are now again on really, really awful dental insurance, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Natalie Wolf, and Clare Rolens. A special welcome to Clare, who is new to our team. Clare is an English professor at Palomar College in San Marcos, CA, where she has a big hand in Bravura (bravurajournal.org). Clare has published academic and creative writing, the latter in such places as Vestal Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, and Litbreak Magazine. We are so glad to have Clare on the team!
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This issue also marks the retirement of our friend Tony Press from the editorial staff. Tony is a fine writer, talented editor, and one lovely human being. He will be missed.
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We hope you enjoy this new issue of One Sentence Poems. Oh, and thanks to my wife Marilyn, who talked me out of renaming the journal Rhoda. This is another example of how this excellent person has again saved me from one of my many dark impulses.
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Yours,
Dale
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Gary Grossman
Impulse Control
Strong impulse
control means
missing the
blood moon of
November,
the Coho
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Salmon that
just jumped
the falls, and
the tickling
wind of March
across bare skin.
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Gary Grossman’s poetry book, Lyrical Years (2023) is available from Kelsay Press, and What I Meant to Say Was… will be published by Impspired Press in late 2023.
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Maddison Scott
We’re All Exhausted Here
My pillow once embraced
my exhaustion
yet now
when I place my head down,
the stuffing shifts
and
I’m left wondering
if the weight of my head
is exhausting for the pillow.
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Maddison Scott's catchy bio felt too long so if you want more of her fiction and poetry, check out maddisonscott.wordpress.com
Richard Clarke
Mates on a Train
From dingy Central Station the train
rattled west through fibro suburbs
then turned south crossing rivers and
passing through mountains
as my mate and I
turned our attention
to a game of chess
which somehow went my way
at first while the paddocks and towns of inland NSW
slipped past in the dusk
until he had only one pawn
and his king left but
mercilessly he manipulated my impatience
to such effect that as we passed Yass
he checkmated me and in frustration
I swept rooks, knights, bishops
and the chessboard
itself to the floor of the spartan carriage
as our creaking train
crept south to Albury.
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Richard Clarke is a retired teacher who, after teaching poetry for 40 years, has finally decided to have a go at writing it.
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Jennifer Browne
Orecchiette
Masters and Johnson used
plethysmography to measure
arousal in the breasts and skin
and lungs and bladder, but it's
the swelling of your earlobes
I long to taste in these toothsome
little bites, pale al dente substitutes
for the wide skiff of your scapha,
that leave my sensitive thumb
lonely for the perfect curve
of your more sensitive antihelix,
all these delicate structures into which
I want to speak my hungers,
by which you’ve come
to hear me so well.
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Garima Rani Saxena
Wear It Loose
Her hair
was growing longer by the second,
and she could tell
that by morning
it would not only be
touching the ground
but would leave the house
actively pursuing the things
she had merely waited for.
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Garima Rani Saxena is an artist, interjecting that she likes to write.
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Howie Good
Subterranean Cancer Blues
I wait two floors below ground
for my daily turn on the machine
that murders the toxic cells
that would murder me,
and while waiting, I see you,
a shriveled child (boy? girl?)
slumped in a wheelchair,
your limbs mere wisps,
your pale little face without expression
or a warming shadow of detail,
and I feel dizzy with guilt and shame
for having even looked over
and then quickly looked away
and been admitted unprepared
to the kind of knowledge that now
holds my eyes open to the dark.
Howie Good's newest poetry collection, Frowny Face, a synergistic mix of his prose poems and handmade collages, is forthcoming from Redhawk Publications.
Charles Peoples III
Deviled Egg
Pickled, sweet,
made of morning,
boiled before the house
is ready for consumption,
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I am to be prepared
for touch and rub,
insides exposed,
flesh ripped
of heart to ache,
from boy to man.
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Charles Peoples III is a musician-turned-poet via existential crises and can be found at www.CharlesPeoplesIII.com
Kateri Boucher
Leaving the Lake
Perhaps the trick is to get out
of the water in such a way that
even when you go up the ladder,
over the docks, up the stairs, back
across the lawn, into your car,
through the streets, into the city,
back under the roofs, under the name
of whatever life you happen to be
living, you find somehow that
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part of you is still out in all that
cold water, swimming.
Kateri Boucher lives in Detroit, Michigan, where she spends her time working for an Episcopal Church, studying theology, and wandering through the city’s many strange fields.
John L. Gronbeck-Tedesco
Mornings at 3
Every morning just at 3,
in the silence of dark time, before
lunging into his savage day in a
factory somewhere far from us, our father
etched with calloused thumb the sign of the cross into
the foreheads of my mother, my sister, my brother, and me.
John L. Gronbeck-Tedesco's poems, stories, translations and plays have appeared in publications and venues such as The Bombay Review, Tuck Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Karamu House Theatre.
David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton
Harmless threat
A dozen times over as many years
Mom locks herself in a bathroom
clutching a bottle of pills
she threatens to take
as Dad
mows the lawn
David Q. Hutcheson-Tipton is a Denver-based poet and semi-retired physician with an MFA from Regis University whose poems have been curated in Unlost Journal and Mountains Talking.
B. Fulton Jennes
The Only Poem I’ll Ever Write About
My Father’s Kindness
That day I took your claw hammer,
your D-shaped coping saw,
the orange-capped Elmer’s glue,
the little can of Minwax
left over from Nana’s vanity,
nails from the coffee can
over the rumble-furnace,
and made you an ashtray—
a thick-lipped square pit
of scrap wood, sawn, glued,
stained, with two half-driven nails
to hold your ember-tipped coffin nail
between thin silver fingers—
you could have mocked my choice
of flammable material, could have
berated my borrowing of verboten tools,
could have raged about the bent nails
and sawdust left littering the workshop floor,
the glue cap chewed open by a front tooth,
the brown-streaked yellow cheeks
of the still-open stain can, the worklight
left burning above it all,
but you lit the last Pall Mall from your pack,
blew a caterpillar of smoke rings
into the evening air and flicked
a soft gray worm of ash
into the cobbled thing I lifted to you.
B. Fulton Jennes has won awards and accolades for poems containing more than one sentence, including those in her collection Blinded Birds, winner of the 2022 International Book Award for a Poetry Chapbook.
Jill Michelle's latest poems are forthcoming in Brink, LEON Literary Review, New Ohio Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Valley Voices, and her previously published works can be found at byjillmichelle.com.
Erica Goss speaks English but dreams in German.
F. J. Bergmann
Comparative Lit
The AC stopped working and it was 90°
and hardly going to drop at all overnight
so we decided to go to a cheap motel
but not so cheap that it didn’t have a pool
and the pool was tiny but nice even though
the whirlpool was barely warm at all
so we were happy until we realized that
running the AC in the room made it more
and more damp and clammy so eventually
the clean sheets and pillows were soggy
with moisture but at least we were cool
and I did my best to try to catch up with
all the overdue work on my computer
until the stack of past-due jobs circling
overhead got overwhelming and I felt
like I would never catch up so I decided
to burrow back into the fantasy novel
I’d been not allowing myself to read
until I’d finished what I was behind on
where the protagonist was having a much
worse time than I was what with magical
rivals and awful monsters and a ridiculous
amount of unfinished homework learning
languages and incantations that her life
depended on and the contrast between
our respective situations was so dramatic
and encouraging that the next day when
we went home again I breezed through
the backlog and it turned out the AC
was working just fine.
F. J. Bergmann lives in Wisconsin and likes to ride horses. She is pretty sure she’d like to ride unicorns, if only they’d cooperate.
Steve Klepetar
Houses
in my neighborhood
look the same, more or less,
each one larger on the inside
than on the out,
with attractive roofs
and calm colors
based on the glowing light of stars,
so sometimes I forget
which house is mine,
stumble into some scene
of domestic bliss
in different kitchens
with strange foods
prepared all times of day
by my neighbors,
those kind gourmands,
who feed me, then walk me back
to the right place,
as the blue door opens to take me in.
Steve Klepetar took his granddaughters for lunch at a new concept restaurant called Unfriendly's, where the waitress threw the silverware at them and told them exactly what they were going to eat.
John Arthur
Unforced Error
Jimmy is lanky now,
standing in the batter’s box
like he’s got two spines
when he swings at a slider
outside, connects on the meat
of the bat with a sweet ohm
humming up his forearms,
taking off for first,
dashing down the line
as a pelican catches
the ball mid-flight,
dipping before she rises,
center fielder ducking,
soaring over the fence,
dodging a balloon released,
child below still reaching
and crying, hovering above
the parking lot where last year
dad nodded out for good
in the passenger seat
of the Taurus, then up
into cumulonimbus
with feathers blending
into white vapor,
and Jimmy’s rounding third
despite the umpire
calling it dead,
full speed toward home.
John Arthur is a writer, musician, and librarian.
X. P. Callahan
Fortune Cookie
You’re fated to lose
everything—
your family, your friends,
your money, your health,
your good looks,
hope for a future—
but probably not
all at once,
and not this morning.
X. P. Callahan is the proprietor of Centorama: Happy Home of the Recombinant Poem (www.centoramapoems.com), has published work in Rattle and elsewhere, and writes the Diary Poems newsletter on Substack (xpcallahan.substack.com).
Robert Witmer
A failing sun
in a small piazza
slants across our table,
where we smile
wistfully
at the hungry sparrows
hopping round our crumbs
and let go
of one another
so that slow shadows
retreat across the checkered tablecloth
beneath our empty hands.
Robert Witmer, a longtime resident of Japan with a passion for poetry and the great outdoors, has recently published his second book of poetry, Serendipity.
Cecil Morris
Escape Thwarted
Looking for silence, I follow a trail
through alder saplings and elderberries,
through the non-stop gossip of their broad leaves,
the moving shadows of their colloquy,
and find, even when I reach the deep woods,
the moss-hung, thick-trunked spruce and the spires
of Douglas fir, the world keeps talking.
Retired after 37 years of teaching high school English, Cecil Morris now tries writing what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (he hopes) to enjoy.
David Adès
Full Hands
I know they hold everything
they have ever held,
each body, each cupped heartbeat,
each bearable and unbearable love.
David Adès is an Australian poet whose most recent book Afloat in Light is available through UWA Publishing at https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/afloat-in-light.
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!
