Amy Snodgrass

Three Miracles

The water that has since washed them away

-those structures built by my daughter, carefully or with abandon depending on the day-

leaves patterns in the dirt,

waves and trails and hiccups that become, after a sincere but brief mourning period,

landscapes for new adventures

in this extra fine dirt with an inexplicable sparkle, fairy dust as she dances through it-

a deserted construction site miracle, this dancing- and

then yesterday, she said, “Mom! My mountain. It’s still there” and I see that

it had survived a downpour and I,

well, I

let her think it was another miracle

instead of swiping on my phone to teach her how cement hardens under water,

trusting

that years from now,

she will forgive me.

Amy Snodgrass eats a lot of Dove dark chocolate.

 

 

Mike Cole

There is
this morning
snow
on the ridge
out our kitchen window

and we are glad
for the cold
and the brightness.

Mike Cole lives and writes and waits on the arrival of poems in the mountains of Central California near Yosemite.

 

 

María Castro Domínguez

Llenar un espacio en blanco en un formulario

Viuda, huérfana, viudo, sin padres
sin palabras
para una madre que ha perdido su hija
para un padre que ha perdido su hijo
cómo llenar el formulario
tan vasto
tan vacío.

Filling a blank space in a form

Widow, orphan, widower, unparented
no word
for a parent who has lost a child
how to fill a form in
so vast
so empty.

María Castro Domínguez has been born many times. She has three poetry collections out in the world, two are co-authored. Her tweet handle is @marcasdom.

 

 

María Castro Domínguez

Madre

Reflejo su rostro
mandíbulas fuertes, pómulos que duelen pero
ella huele a especies,
más morena más alta más ancha que yo,
ella trata de convertirme en una miniatura
el verticilo, la pepita que perdió al nacer
cuando yo empecé.

Mother

I mirror her face,
strong jaws cheek bones that hurt but
she smells of spice
darker taller broader than me,
she tries to make me into a miniature
the whorl the pip she lost at birth
when I began.

María Castro Domínguez has been born many times. She has three poetry collections out in the world, two are co-authored. Her tweet handle is @marcasdom.

 

 

from the Editors

Natalie Wolf has joined the editorial team at One Sentence Poems. In addition to  reading and voting on submissions,  Natalie is posting the poems on the website.

Natalie  is from Kansas, where she enjoys writing poetry and fiction and thinking about cats. Her poetry has appeared in Right Hand Pointing, I-70 Review, and Live Ideas. For more of her stuff and things, see here.

Our thanks and welcome to Natalie!

Dale, Tony, & Liz

 

Lynn Aprill

In the Schoolhouse

A summer bee bumbles through
the window as we sit, a one-room
Sunday school, in the schoolhouse

where my father stood
with his cousin-best-friend
and stared hard at the camera,
tough at ten, in the schoolhouse

where my grandfather learned
8th grade arithmetic, then left
to start his life as a farmer-carpenter
on land 500 yards from the schoolhouse

that his grandfather built–that august immigrant
who left his homeland just in time to fight
a civil war in his new one, who missed
the birth of my great-grandfather
while surviving the Battle of Nashville–
back in 1894 for $289.00, so that

generations later, I can sit
at a wooden desk, tracing the ancient
carvings of pocket knives, memorizing
“Beautiful Savior,” decorating egg carton
crosses with plastic posies
pilfered from the next-door neighbor
graves of my ancestors.

Educator and poet Lynn Aprill’s poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets calendar, Bramble, Pure Slush, and in her upcoming chapbook Channeling Matriarchs with Finishing Line Press.