One - by Jacar Press

Issue 31

April 9, 2025 by Jacar Press

Purple Sky Sunset by Julia S. Powell

Second Look – Czeslaw Milosz

The Last Gate to an Old Life

for Lucy

In the last year of the old drought,
I arrived at the house made of mud bricks
and the darkness of faith. The door
was ajar. On the walls were photographs
of events, relics, maps of our claim
to belonging. The rooms were filled
with the echo of your voice, with the songs
of rituals; the incantation of a thousand lives.

All along, in a country where evenings settle
into the epiphany of a dark and distant sky,
where cows walked over the graves
of old souls, I had lived in small rooms
with the memories of every harvest
while writing into sunset the sonnet
that follows every bird flying
from one continent to the edge of another.

I remembered the chant of your long life,
but not your face—the lines on it,
the borders that appeared and disappeared.
For perhaps, this is the greatest sorrow of all,
I had arrived at the gates of death, the playground
of my childhood, and didn’t remember the beginning
of my own life. All that was left of remembrance
was an old house, a graveyard filled with bones
heavy with language, filled with the elegy
of the silenced and the prayers of those faithful
to reincarnation as they are to the decay of flesh,
and all around me were the shadows of old trees,
witnesses to hope and despair.

Romeo Oriogun is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), short-listed for the 2021 Lambda Award for Gay Poetry, Nomad (Griots Lounge Press, 2022), which won the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature, and The Gathering of Bastards (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and winner of the 2023 Julie Suk Award.

Reminded

Each time I ask the donkeys
to shift to the side, so I can move between their bodies,
between their breathing flanks and bony hocks,

they reach up urgent mouths and exhale
a warm equine language, a wiffle of breath in my ear,
eyes dark, resting a jaw on my shoulder.

I have no hold on spirit, or what feels like belonging
to something larger than ourselves—but believe it is here
in moments like this.

What are we after all, but breath?
I lean into their gray sides and ask the donkeys to lift their hooves,
and clean the packed soil from the soles of each, one by one.

Rebecca Weil’s recent work is published or forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, Humana Obscura, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art and The Journal of Wild Culture. She is the author of the award-winning nonfiction book Bring Me the Ocean.

From the Book of 1 a.m.

if the man exits his house
on a night when the sky

has rearranged the
illuminated furniture of the stars,

& if that man,
though still in early middle-age,

sees in the reflection
of his neighbor’s automobile window

that his hair has gone
completely white,

then do not wonder
why it is that the road

he follows out of town
is one not listed on any local map,

nor why,
upon entering a wilderness

he had formerly avoided
like an insomniac might

an empty bed,

his eyes so quickly
come to match the color

of the river that runs beside him.

Kareem Tayyar’s most recent book, Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems, was published in 2022 by Lily Poetry Review Books.

Stranded By the Roadside

In my dream, my grandfather gave me the bicycle
he brought home after the civil war. He said the war
didn’t end & I would need the bicycle to navigate

the turbulence that would cross my life. I was
twelve and my life was just breaking out like petals
in the yellow sun. Since then, I stopped growing sunflowers

in the backyard that faced my window—
I looked at golden colors in the afternoon sun,
& carried my grandfather’s bicycle—

its headlight blinded by time; its pedals bruised
by ageing—on my journey into the depth of journey
borne from a desire to leave a home that keeps bringing

the war to my front door like a wild boar charging
at a seeker. Tonight, I will be waiting for my grandfather
in my dream, to tell him the bicycle he gave me is blind.

Ageing has climbed into its pedals. I’m stranded by the roadside,
along the Niger, waiting for the soldiers’ tanks to swallow me
in their bellies like snakes swallowing their prey. But my grandfather

didn’t come to my room, he didn’t visit my dream. Instead,
I was in my grandfather’s dream and his dream was melting
into mine like olive oil in a pot on fire & my body shivered

as his figure, like a chariot of cloud, collapsed into mine.
He taught me to ride my bicycle against the coming
civil war, he held my hands straight on the rusty handlebars,

my palms covered in dirt, put my legs on the stiff pedals
& said: look ahead & ride across the river.

Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé is from Tede, Nigeria. He is a third-year M.F.A. candidate at Florida State University. His poetry manuscript is a finalist for the Acre Books poetry series and a semi-finalist for the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry, the Wisconsin Poetry Series’ Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes. His work appears in Poetry Wales, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Texas Review, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.

If There Is a Field

and there is a war
at the foot of that field,

and if there are corporals and strategists
staggering around

beneath their burdens

trying to trade oil
wrung from chicory and trefoil

for sardines and cell phones,

there is a little white flower
in the soil, just one of them,

growing in thumbnail size,
glowing like a christening gown,

its petals tied in a bow.

If you can find her
and undo her,

breasts will rain down on you,
rivers will run clean once again,

and loaves of bread
will sprout up everywhere,

as earnestly as mushrooms.

Erin Wilson’s poems have appeared in Manhattan Review, Sugar House Review, Lake Effect, EVENT, The Fiddlehead, Verse Daily, and elsewhere internationally. Her latest collection is Blue, whose title poem won a Pushcart. Her dearest friends are trees and wind, and wind through trees. She lives a small life on Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory, in Northern Ontario, Canada.

Big breasts

Excessive, too large, too much, as the Pacific is too much
saltwater, as the fourth range of Appalachians is one too many. Third
most common search on Pornhub, yet inordinate,
extravagant. Sculptural white kabocha squash,
in a market for small firm freckled pairs
of pears. Full-bellied jugs swelling fat between champagne
flutes; harlequin macaws gaudy among cedar waxwings’
perfectly pointed crests, demure masks, delicate scarlet lick:
we roll and flop like wounded carp, ripple and slap
back, waves broken by the hard yank of the moon’s stone bright
in iolite sky, an all-over quiver, no spine to hold our pecan-
pie-blowzy oversweet. —But even our vast: no match for sky
made of smog, stream-sluiced lead, colony collapse, plastic
particles suspended in blood-sea like pepper in eel
aspic, growth hormones floated in milk. Even now
some tangled garbage patch three times the size of France
may seek to net and strangle white cells
as they surge upstream from their spawning
grounds in the femoral marrows. Even now
poachers’ nets tangle wild parrots, even now
other satiny squash-skins sprout rashy patches, fungal knobs,
marks of Cain or the chlorofluorocarbon beast. So maybe celebrate
our bulging slopes, our abundant overripe, the last
macaw’s last exuberant shriek high in the home canopy,
or refrain, today, from spitting on the swell
of the briefly peaceful sea: since no one knows how long
till the big-bore needles gouge in,
till we too are cut down to size, all our overweening
surplus and unrestraint crammed back
into a woman’s place.

Catherine Carter’s most recent collections are Good Morning, Unseen (Jacar Press) and Larvae of the Nearest Stars (LSUP.) Her award-winning work has also appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Orion, Ecotone, Poetry, Tar River Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, and Ploughshares, among others.

From a Professor of Women’s Studies

Last week she told us she saw a hunted doe
strapped to a pickup truck. It haunts her.
When is dating not hunting? she asked.

She overdresses she admits to draw attention
to the underdressed. Today she’s gone Victorian,
lacey gloves gripping the podium, begins

with the story of an Australian man who ran
to the local police with a gelatinous blob
he found on the beach. He thought it perhaps

proof of a drowning or murder, presumed it
a wayward breast implant, not the jellyfish
it turned out to be. This man has not kept up

with the news, she adds. A few years prior,
a swarm of jellyfish, said to look and feel like
breast implants, washed up in New Zealand.

Did he have more than crime on his mind?
She pauses for someone to answer.
I’m stuck on how an implant could possibly

dislodge itself from a body. No victim
could cough one up in a struggle for breath,
although a killer could do the slicing.

Late one night, a bone-thin woman shopped
wearing a string bikini top over double D’s
in an unzipped hoody. It’s winter, always frigid

winter inside a Trader Joe’s, her navel visible,
her blonde, her bowl of hard and hard-won fruit.
Had I such need, I’d not the nerve, knowing

how a meaty grip around my twiggy arm
could pull me down. I shivered for her,
and though I like to imagine angels trail us

in their chariots, isn’t it true we’re left alone
here to love and torture each other?
The professor still waits for our response.

M. Nasorri Pavone’s poetry has appeared in River Styx, One, b o d y, Sycamore Review, New Letters, The Cortland Review, Rhino, The Citron Review, Innisfree, DMQ Review, Pirene’s Fountain, I-70 Review, One Art and elsewhere. She’s been anthologized in Beyond the Lyric Moment (Tebot Bach, 2014), and nominated several times for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.

Poem for a pet bird

(Mohua, budgerigar)

The light of the house has gone,
broken at the bottom of a cage
on a grey winter’s morning.

No more yellow bird
reciting the alphabet,
asking if we’d like a cup of tea
and mimicking the pouring.

No more Hokey Tokey on a perch
or Eric Idle imitations.
And the weasel has really popped.

We shuffle room to room
finding gaps everywhere
small enough to swallow us

like children looking for a charm
missing from a bracelet,
which we know we’ll never find —
a wicked fairy has taken it.

In the garden
a small grave covered
with silverbeet and millet sprays
might prompt a stranger
to say, It was just a bird!

as a flock of handkerchiefs
flaps on the line
and a scarf of swifts
binds the day’s fury.

Jan FitzGerald’s poems have appeared regularly in NZ literary journals and overseas in Atlanta Review, The Loch Raven Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Voegelin View, The London Magazine, The High Window, Acumen and Orbis and been shortlisted twice in the Bridport Poetry Prize. She has four poetry books published.

What Pounds

—for Rebecca Roberts

Say the joy of childhood’s
joys ends like a failed heart,

like death too soon. Say a mind
gives way like a soul trapped

under the rubble or a slide of stones
(mother dead, money gone, family

split, body invaded at bladepoint,
body broken, a father lost).

Or say Love says, Come,
work out, be strong—No, be

the strongest one. I love
that tenderness can power

the lift of the heaviest stone
or stack of iron: hundreds

of pounds I could never budge,
though she can deadlift them

off the earth, if only briefly.
Praise her for all the weights

of the world she’s lifted
over and over until the blade

that tried to take it all away
is broken, and the deaths that might

have tripped her up are turned
to ash, the most precious of which

she wears around her neck.
Twice she’s been the strongest

woman in the world, but wants
more—wants to own the title

of strongest woman who’s ever lived.
Cheer for her for all of us who

can barely manage what pounds
and poundings the world gives us to bear.

Matthew Murrey is the author of Bulletproof (Jacar Press, 2019) and the forthcoming collection, Little Joy (Cornerstone Press, 2026). Recent poems are in Passengers, Whale Road Review, Moist and elsewhere. He was a public school librarian for 21 years—19 of those in Urbana, IL, where he lives with his partner.

The Poisoned Aquifer

While I was girl alive, they made me crawl
inside a tomb beneath the pear tree’s roots
and sealed the door, because I’d dared to call
a spade a spade. Each year, fat yellow fruits
would thud against my roof and shake my bones
in the twill dress that was now my only skin.
Despite my candor, no one moved the stones
heaped on my grave to dig me up again.
Thrilled schoolgirls whispered tales about the wrong
I’d borne. Their titillation made me strong.
The more they talked, the taller I became:
first, seven feet, then twelve. My tomb’s walls burst,
and out my thighs, transformed to rivers, thrust.
Their waters taste like pear but scald like flame.

Jenna Le is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). Her poems appear in AGNI, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. She works as a physician and educator in New York City.

Plums

My house sinks into its garden
so that in bed, out the window
I can pick the plums that fall
pitch purple in the grass,
the ripe ones with soft skin
burst in jaundiced wet patches.
I lay eating plums till afternoon,
even the bitter rosy taut ones,
reaching back out for a plummy
handful, reaching back out for a
plummy handful, reaching back
to wipe a hand in the gluey grass,
reaching back out, growing vague
with the unduty of it, never not
sweet animal heaven. I leave plum
chunks ungnawed on the pits and
throw them out and eat more plums
and then there are no plums left.
I draw the blinds. I close my eyes.
My body is a blind tense thing buzzing
with pleasure for a long dark moment.

Selen Ozturk is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work appears in Necessary Fiction, Hobart, minor literature[s], Evergreen Review, Split Lip Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Expat Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, and SFGATE. She has received support from Bread Loaf, GrubStreet, and The Writers’ Grotto.

Perennials

They arrive with their baggage
and their pre-tan, smashed across
the sand like a plane wreck seeking
beauty, all wilting under a Florida
sky spilling trophies of light, seagulls
hovering like a painting of seagulls,
countdown to dinner and drinks, cool
marble floor and faux columns speaking
to an empire no one remembers until
the moon blinks open and exposes
the waves collapsing like exhausted brides,
curls of foam dragging the beach’s nape
until it recedes and repeats, leaving the men
to wonder maybe sex tonight? It’s been
so long and we’ve been so good, nothing
to spoil the mood as back home neighbors
dig out from another storm, gloves and
cheeks brailled in salt, in jealous half
mutterings. She wipes the makeup from
her eyes as he watches, arm propped
on a pillow. I have something for you, she
says, and steps into a closet deep as a tomb.

Christopher Locke’s poems have appeared in The North American Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Poetry East, Southwest Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. He’s been awarded grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. His new book of poems, Music For Ghosts (NYQ Books), was released in 2022. Chris lives in the Adirondacks and teaches English at SUNY Plattsburgh.

Salabhasana

Aware of need to shed
unneeded awareness—
crickety neck, sciatic singe
through butt and thigh—

I lie on the mat, blubbery
with disconsolations
of age, yet strain toward this
abandonment, to attend

faint stridulations
still chirring within
the body’s underbrush,
their willful persistence

to persist, and become
what I am not now: alien
otherness, with a locust’s
plated armature of mind.

*
Laughable how I teeter
on pelvis bone and groin,
with legs and torso
cantilevered in a lazy V,

arms stretched back,
palms up, mimicking
the insect’s hind femora
sprung for flight

till my muscles waver
and succumb to gravity’s
tempting embrace, flat-
lining me to the floor.

*
Unabating voracity
compels them to consume
their weight by day,
but remain in the crowd-

ravaged field till serotonin
morphs the millions up
in a threshing clatter
that obliterates the stars.

*
Breath yoked to nothingness,
mind unyoked from flesh—
must I admit the failure?
My tendons hunger

for stillness and release
from this unmastered
posture, this yearning
for one poised exhalation

to loft me in its swarm.

Richard Foerster’s ninth collection, With Little Light and Sometimes None at All (littoralbooks.com), was a finalist for the 2024 Maine Literary Award in Poetry and a Gold Medal winner at this year’s Independent Publishers of New England Book Awards. His other honors include the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships. He lives in Eliot, Maine.

The Manatees, Myers-Briggs Personality Type INFP, Hang Out

Submerged but with backs breaking
the surface, they nickel the Little River,
each patch of semi-social animal

a formal charger set down on leaf-stained
linen. Materializing submarines, full
bodies in a ghostly elongation underneath.

Two handfuls of scattered glinting hatches
I spy from the driveway’s end before
it breaches into sand. During cold fronts,

they reallocate to this shallow refuge—
paddle craft-only zone where no motored
blades can nick them—these curious sea

cows that always seem to smile
even when champing on turtle grass
and water celery with the teeth

they hold in their throats, “marching
molars” that grow in back and move
forward to replace sand-worn enamel.

Every so often, heads surface to snort
the slow-to-warm air, refilling lungs
that hold oxygen for 20 minutes

or, having drifted with the tide, surge
back against it to remain in their calm
aggregation. This is not the rarer

sight of a mating herd, with a dozen
males thrashing over one female, nor
the splashier migration I witnessed once

from a different beach as they powered
15 miles per hour through the whitecaps,
but I stare at it all the same. I bask

in their basking. I look for a way
to stay suspended in community,
to rise with them under a disloyal, shifting sun.

A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 12 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), the winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. Forthcoming books include What Forges Us Steel: The Judge Judy Poems (Alternating Current Press, 2025) and Domiciliary (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2026).

Love Poem

—with part of a line from Frank X. Gaspar

You don’t remember it yet
but I made you feel invincible.

You were cornered and no one else
believed, or you didn’t believe

in yourself. Or I didn’t.
But I’m not the hero of this story,

you are. I’m just the part
you remember like the time

I borrowed your car, returned it
out of gas, or praised every item

in a failed recipe. We laughed
all night. Or didn’t. Or one of us

holding the other’s hair,
vomit spattering porcelain.

You were a toddler
or drunk, I was in a hurry

or so patient it made you cry.
You don’t remember it yet,

but we didn’t speak for a year
over something I said then fell

back into step after coffee,
bought matching earrings,

made another date,
went on and on and on.

Melody Wilson’s poems appear in Catamaran, Watershed, VerseDaily, West Trade Review, Emerson Review, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere and her manuscript Madre Dura was a finalist for the Catamaran Prize and the Louisville Review National Poetry Prize. She received her MFA from Pacific University.

Barter

I scatter self-cut hair on the garden path,
Hansel-and-Gretel-ing strands of myself,
aware my crow will take up these offerings
to weave between pencilly twigs and lush moss,
to line a bed for the crepey bodies of her nestlings.
In return I want nothing, of course, but there are
rules, and she brings me a cobalt marble, a key,
and a yellow bottle cap, emblazoned with HOPE.

Nuala O’Connor lives in Co. Galway, Ireland. Her sixth novel, Seaborne, about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, is nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2024 Irish Book Awards. Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, is published by Arlen House, 31st March 2025.

Visitation

My wife was back in the ICU,
complications from her liver transplant,
alternating between oxycodone and morphine.

Eighty miles south of Westwood
her brother, dying of bone cancer
on a morphine trip of his own.

Yesterday during my visit
she had a conversation
with our niece, not in the room,

while I studied the hills above Bel Air.
Pointing excitedly
to the bathroom, calling to our dog, Pooky,

whom she saw on the shelf
among the extra rolls of toilet paper
and stack of adult diapers.

The next day she asked,
did my brother, Bill, come to see me?
Yes, I lied, how did that go?

We spent the night talking,
he fell asleep holding my hand
in the bed next to me.

I examined the private room
for the bed that wasn’t there
and played back last night’s phone call

reporting Bill’s death
in a bed of his own.

Roger Camp muses over his orchids, daily walks the Seal Beach pier, spends afternoons playing blues piano, and reads under an Angel’s Trumpet surrounded by a charm of hummingbirds. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including the National Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod and is forthcoming in Scientific American and Grey’s Sporting Journal.

Invisible

1.
When they are thirteen, all boys want to be invisible.

2.
The physicists tell us ninety percent of the universe is invisible.

3.
Should it not occur to us that since the greatest part of our lives
is lived in our minds, we too are ninety percent invisible?

4.
When we watch the willow branches stirred by the wind,
when we watch the cumulus clouds billow in the wind,
when we watch the paper kite strain the string in the wind,
three times we ponder the invisible.

5.
Of all the incredible things about my cat Hector,
the most incredible is how he sees the invisible.

6.
Except when it is reflecting something else, glass,
the most miraculous of materials, so too the most
metaphorical, is naturally visibly invisible.

7.
And then there is godmother death, her gray hair,
her false teeth, her cane, whom we know from birth,
so familiar to us she is all but invisible.

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 more than 40 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

All Together Now

As we strangers sit in a circle
of the library’s folding chairs,
I begin to believe what I read,
that we are all radiances, random bits of life
alive together for an instant.
Maria tells us she’s a recent widow,
from Greece, speaks with an accent,
radiating me light years back
to my friend Vassi, widow of Chris,
how I’d like these two to meet,
how many radiating days
have passed since Yannis,
husband of Felicia, father of Pedro,
gathered us at their house in Athens,
that Easter long before I became a widow,
a few years before my daughter was born.
How memory wrinkles time
so its folds join now with long ago—
Yannis doing a science experiment
to impress our little boys,
sliding a boiled egg unscathed
through a bottle’s neck,
our sons who now
have little ones of their own,
thirty years after we gathered
to eat roast lamb for Easter
in Athens that warm April afternoon,
my husband still alive,
us taking the ferry, climbing
Santorini’s steep paths,
radiating around a volcano’s
sunken crater, while Billy, not yet two,
plays with toy cars, as his son does,
the same glee in seeing them
clatter and land in a muddy heap,
time in mind folding everything together—
all of us now on folding chairs,
strangers quickly becoming
radiant acquaintances,
one of us from Greece,
as the sun begins to set,
on a spring evening in Vermont,
daffodils shimmering with light.

Laura Foley, a bi/queer poet, author of nine poetry collections, has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, The Common Good Books Poetry Prize, The Poetry Box Editor’s Choice Award and others, and has been published in many journals such as Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, One, and American Life in Poetry.

The Woodworker’s Craft

Art of the adze inherited in the careful cut
of a bandsaw. The smell of pine, showered
sawdust. The earned craft of a well-made
thing. Few still seek a small shop’s fitted

planks and board. Websites carry knock-
offs, machine made and wood glued, not
grooved together so tight no sandpaper
fits between the slats. Only the eye trained

after years of mistakes and cast-off planks
sees the way the boards cleave like words
in a sentence, placed and spaced with care.
Mistakes only serve to plan the next one.

Learn from masters. Build projects others
have shaped. Know the groove and hew
of every chisel, level, and jigsaw blade.
Study plans you have no hope to achieve.

Let the others snap together pre-cut pieces.
The plumb is the only true measure.
Sunken nails no one sees hides the work.
Blood from a cut finger whets the blade.

Jeff Newberry is the author most recently of How to Talk About the Dead (Red Hawk Publications, forthcoming Spring 2024). An essayist, novelist, and poet, his writing has appeared in a wide variety of print and online journals, including Redactions, Red Rock Review, and previously in One.

Apiology

It was nothing, Bro. I’ve been drinking so much
tea I can’t sleep despite deprivation. The trade-
offs we make to pay the bills. As for getting up

early to write, I’m not getting enough sleep
as it is. It’s time again to vie for bonuses,
time for stress in tsunamis. And for what?

Money not enough to get the life I want. This
was yesterday in a nutshell: driving to work,
your podcast on Spotify, I laughed, and again

from parking lot to office, my shoelaces flailing,
laughing at gravity, wanting to hunt with lions,
to shear sheep, pole dance, thrash like salmon.

But there are moments, while coding, when
I catch myself fiddling with variables no one
will ever see, renaming parakeet to peregrine,

peregrine to flea, flea to squid, and I’m adrift
in brightness so floral I turn into a worker bee.
Bro, I still pollinate. I still try to make honey.

Kenton K. Yee has placed poems in Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, RHINO, Cincinnati Review, Quarterly West, Plume Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Indianapolis Review, Scientific American, and Rattle, among others. He writes from Northern California.

Contents