Belief by Frank Gaughan

Belief We must believe that Lucy wants to hold the football for Charlie. To think otherwise suggests cruelty, and Lucy is not cruel. She offers psychiatric help for five cents. Charlie knows there …

ONE ART: a journal of poetry
Scapegrace by Alison Hurwitz

Scapegrace My son does not want Anne of Green Gables to make any more mistakes. First, a blunder sends her best friend stumbling into drunkenness— the raspberry cordial which was really currant win…

ONE ART: a journal of poetry
What You Were Saying by George Franklin

What You Were Saying If the world should end while we are on one of our walks, I won’t complain or use my last minutes to imagine All the places we could have traveled or all the things I wanted us…

ONE ART: a journal of poetry
Apology Flowers by Jessica D. Thompson

Apology Flowers After an argument, he buys her a grocery store bouquet. Two weeks later, she tears apart his apology flowers—the pink roses, white lilies, purple and yellow mums, the red-striped ca…

ONE ART: a journal of poetry
A mother and son listen to “Stayin’ Alive” in a poem by Evan Leslie

In Evan Leslie's poem "We Play 'Stayin’ Alive'", a son goes through his late father's things with his mother and comes across a copy of the 1977 "Saturday Night Fever" LP. They put it on "his old beloved, / big, wood-finished Magnavox" and hear how "that Saturday Night Fever bass starts

111 Words
WE PLAY “STAYIN’ ALIVE” by Evan Leslie

WE PLAY “STAYIN’ ALIVE” and learn howling and crackle are common to both the sounds of longing and the sounds of losing – like fire snaps, like this needle-kissed hiss that warms …

ONE ART: a journal of poetry
Winter 2026 by Marjorie Maddox

Winter 2026 The snow. All morning I’ve been shoveling it: stab, scoop, lift, hurl, almost the same motion as digging a plot deep and wide enough for a country, but not quite, almost strenuous enoug…

ONE ART: a journal of poetry
The Crosstown Bus by Laura Foley

The Crosstown Bus We board with our senior passes, then we’re five Brearley girls chatting, remembering Mary who lived on 86th, loved everything horses, and that movie we watched at her house when …

ONE ART: a journal of poetry
Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC by Alison Seevak

Waiting Room, Clarity Piercing, Durham NC There are no mothers here but when your daughter invites you, you go and sit on the wooden bench, grateful to be there, after months of silence. You sit ne…

ONE ART: a journal of poetry
Theater of the Real by John Amen

Theater of the Real          for BC & JF To shrug the draft, he leapt a university ladder, shaking the rungs of math, piling numbers on his back. At…

ONE ART: a journal of poetry