Beneath our enchanting facial expressions
the skull always waits, poker face.
Tomas Transtromer
It holds eights and aces,
lingers awhile over the last
bet as the pot swells,
ice clinks in the glasses,
cigar smoke curls,
and in the background
a soft guitar, a woman
singing about the endless road.
Steve Klepetar’s granddaughter Lizzy has a favorite Jane Austen novel, and he’d like you to try and guess which one.
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
Quiet, like darkness,
like the last of the white rhinos,
needs bodyguards.
Jannie Edwards writes from Edmonton, Alberta, where the coyotes and ravens are becoming bolder.
It tasted like electricity
from a hanging
telephone wire,
and I believe what I was tasting
was the soft remnants of life,
as all we eat
is the once-plump hearts
of beheaded crops
and the warm memories
of what we believe food to be.
Lisa Mottolo is a poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Santa Clara Review, Typishly, Counterclock Journal, and others.
Do we all have a destination,
that some small dot in the middle
of concentric circles, willing us
to stretch the skin’s tautness
over our bones and let go, an arc
of us skimming through air,
seeking a landing deep
into the center of another?
Sarah Dickenson Snyder writes to unearth what she didn’t know she knew. https://sarahdickensonsnyder.com/
Consider the period the smaller
of the cannonballs Galileo dropped
from the Tower of Pisa; the comma,
the lolling tongue of a dog; the colon,
the top two buttons left unbuttoned
on her filmy blouse; the semicolon,
an open fly; the exclamation point,
the one-finger salute or a bald man
doing a headstand; the question mark,
an exclamation point bent over with age.
Howie Good is the author most recently of The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).
Editor’s Note: Today is One Sentence Poems‘ 7th anniversary. On March 14, 2014 we ran our first poem which was by Eric Burke. We often ask Eric for another poem to publish on our anniversary. Here is one for today. We thank Eric and every poet who has entrusted their work to us.
Unable to aspire
to mere
prudence,
he prepares himself for dissection,
year after year
(all our childhoods)
evolving
in his cocoon.
Eric Burke programs computers and writes poems in Columbus, Ohio.
In a world of constant information
from TV’s, cell phones and PC’s
the man sitting on a park bench
just feeding the birds with crumbs
from a sandwich on his lunch break
is the only news I recall from today.
William Cullen Jr., a veteran who works at a social services non-profit in New York City, has recently had haiku sequences appear in Frogpond and Modern Haiku.