One Sentence Poems
Mera Baid Kaur​​
J.I. Kleinberg
Ryan McCarty
Juan Pablo Mobili
Boyd Razor
Brad Rose
Tim Tomlinson
Rowena Warwick
Marilyn Westfall​​
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Oxygen Count
“Sentences are our writing commons, the shared ground where every writer walks.”
― Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence.: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life
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Dear Readers and Contributors,
The editors are grateful to all who submitted to this issue and congratulate all whose work appears here. My love and thanks to co-editors Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, Natalie Wolf, and Clare Rolens.
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Yours,
Dale
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Mera Baid Kaur
Evolution
I can watch death take hold and still digest 3 meals a day,
throw clothes in the machines, put them away in heaps,
still tumble out with the children in stained pajamas to check
the mail, sit on the porch as they dig into mud, still help
with homework and braid hair when the feelings land
foreign and unlabeled, requiring a probe to sort
and trace them back to their origins with their blistered
and bleeding and barely stitched seams embroidered
with other feelings from other foreign traumas
I’ve evolved enough to garage.
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Mera Baid Kaur enjoys a life of mothering, gardening, dancing and peppering earworms into unrelated conversation.
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Matthew Caretti
Lalotalie,
or Under the Talie Tree
For Mapu
Before the fruit bats but after
too many beers leading into
his stories of Hawaiian police
stops and first lieutenants
who didn’t know shit from
Shinola, though we must both
admit we don’t know what
Shinola means, we laugh into
now warm froth and toast
one last time before leaving
these easy branches that point
us home or wherever else
the wind might blow.
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As an English teacher, Matthew Caretti spends a good bit of time pondering what it means to compose a sound sentence, which, he thinks, is to make it poetry.
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Rebecca Ferlotti
A Group of English Nerds Converge at a Conference
In St. Louis, we spoke
of color-coded bookshelves,
discussed notebook
overflow,
reminisced about holding
too many pens
for ransom.
Rebecca Ferlotti (she/her) is a writer, editor, and poetry instructor based in Ohio whose poems have been or will be published in One Art, Poetry South, and other journals.
J.I. Kleinberg
Alice Foxall
Morning
The day folded itself in half and
for a moment I could see both versions of me breathing.
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Alice Foxall is a multidisciplinary artist based in London and you can hear her short stories podcast here.
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Nina
When my grandmother left,
the room exhaled with her,
and the quiet that followed felt like mercy.
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Tim Tomlinson
This Is Not a Painting
This is not a painting, this slanted roof—
seen through a window—of a two-car garage,
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the shingles covered with twigs and fallen leaves,
crisscrossed by squirrels who leap into the low
branches of spruce and oak with ivy-covered
trunks, but if it were a painting I’d add
a river in the background, gray and slow
with ice, and buildings on the far banks,
their windows looking this way, and in one
a face, our eyes meet, I’m sure of it, and
beyond that, I’d leave the painting alone.
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Tim Tomlinson, author most recently of Listening to Fish: Meditations from the World, is the director of New York Writers Workshop and a professor in NYU's Global Liberal Studies.
Ryan McCarty
Green Solutions
April and the city sprays the dead edges
along the sidewalks a sticky green,
a goblin spooge green, a 1997
Jeep Grand Cherokee green, flakes of metal
flickering underneath, a green
that moans the last notes of a lament
for vats buried deep since the seventies,
tucked near the reservoir and in the amygdala
of a schoolgirl chasing alien words across
a star-spotted page, while her teacher hums
a life insurance jingle to brighten
the mood, like sunflowers leaching
lead from abandoned fields, piled
in trucks headed for a better-hidden dump
where the rats have been making
babies and hatching plan after plan.
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Ryan McCarty's writing appears on the back of the bus before it appears anywhere else and his fellow riders are proud when it gets into print.
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Claudia Serea
Since I Was Little, I Knew
anything that I imagine in detail
won’t happen,
that’s why I think
about ways to disappear,
freak accidents, a fall,
a heart attack,
that’s why I think about death,
its fluttering red scarf over our heads—
because if I can imagine
its every crease and fold,
it will never touch us.
Claudia Serea is a Romanian-American poet, Pushcart Prize winner, and the author of seven poetry collections, most recently In Those Years, No One Slept (Broadstone Books, 2023).
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Boyd Razor
Give me an F
My father drives his truck
up a mountain's single-lane dirt road
that not only seems as though
it would not allow two trucks,
coming from opposite directions,
to meet and carefully edge past each other,
but in fact would not allow it,
prompting my father to approach
each hidden bend sounding the horn
—a phoneme pitched in F.
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Boyd Razor chairs the Department of Panpsychism-Informed Forensic Topology at a major American community college.
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Rowena Warwick
Places I’ve Laughed
After Diane Seuss
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At the comedy club in Belfast where
religion is hilarious, at the dinner table
with friends over dodgy chicken
and nefarious creamy puddings, loudly
in corridors, under railway arches
always listening for the echo,
in too many meetings
at uncomfortable banter, too fast
too difficult to process
in the moment, at magazines, memes
television sitcoms, generously
at the best man’s painful speech
the father of the bride, my own
hilltops at sunrise in the glorious rush
of a new day, silently
around bonfires with men
who play guitar and stare into the fire,
at signage, at pedants, at roads
shut for maintenance
and most recently at his funeral,
a whiskey fuelled wake of anecdotes
and all his old jokes, where I laughed
so much, so long, that
I had to go outside and weep.
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Rowena Warwick is an award winning, jazz trumpet playing, UK based (but likely to be away travelling), poet.
Juan Pablo Mobili
Oxygen Count
Some days show no mercy to our breath,
but our lungs have not called in sick
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one single day, instead we hired a canary
to warn us when we forget to love, if we counted
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every beat our hearts skipped, their number
would exceed all the men who fought in Troy,
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although we never hid inside a wooden horse,
and our gasps are becoming fond memories.
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Juan Pablo Mobili has been the Poet Laureate of Rockland County, New York, since 2025, and has been “unlaureated” and devoted to poetry for as long as he can remember.
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Catherine Allen
The world could end
peaceful as lettuce
tranquil as peas
quiet
as cold May
garden twilight
when after
a luminous warm
green afternoon
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everything stops.
Catherine Allen is an anthropologist and writer living in Greenbelt, Maryland, whose chapbook, We Return as Rain: Poems from the Andes, is forthcoming with Swan Scythe Press.
Catherine Allen
The world could end
peaceful as lettuce
tranquil as peas
quiet
as cold May
garden twilight
when after
a luminous warm
green afternoon
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everything stops.
Catherine Allen is an anthropologist and writer living in Greenbelt, Maryland, whose chapbook, We Return as Rain: Poems from the Andes, is forthcoming with Swan Scythe Press.
Helen Evans
Fool's Gold
You knew darkness
and pressure,
the seep of iron-rich
water through sediments,
the slow ache
of crystals forming,
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but how could you know that –
washed out of the cliff,
held up to the light –
you’d shine like this?
Helen Evans is a British poet published by HappenStance Press (Only by Flying, 2015) and Mariscat Press (in Mariscat Sampler One, 2024).
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Reem Faruqi
A Letter to My Former Dentist
I don’t think it’s appropriate to be fishing in my mouth,
tap-tapping on my teeth,
asking if I’m a US citizen.
Reem Faruqi is an award-winning children's book author who spends her days trying to write, but instead gets distracted easily by her toddler, camera, and buttery sunlight. www.ReemFaruqi.com.
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Post Miscarriage
I want the kitchen floor to match my body:
clean, uncluttered,
and barren.
Timothy Daly
El derrumbe de un sueño
Tengo sed de plenitud
así que la busco en la multitud
de las mujeres, y así confundo
el amor y el querer de cosas bellas,
y termino hiriéndome a mi mismo
y a ellas.
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The collapse of a dream
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I thirst for fullness
so I look for it in the crowd
of women, and blur the lines
between love and wanting
beautiful things,
and I end up hurting myself
and them.
Desengaño
El problema con la pena
es que de repente tu vida
se llena de ella, y sin
darte cuenta, te vuelves
incapaz de dormir en paz
y contemplar las estrellas
tan bellas.
Disillusion
​The problem with pain
is that before you know it
your life is full of it, and
without realising, you
can no longer sleep and
look out at the beautiful stars.
Timothy Daly writes, edits and researches from a small town in Italy.
Brad Rose
Waiting for Your Call
In my dream,
you phone
to tell me
you will soon
be phoning me
and
when you do,
I should be sure
not to answer.
Brad Rose is the author of eight collections of poetry and microfiction: Or Words to that Effect, I Wouldn’t Say That, Exactly, WordInEdgeWise, Lucky Animals, No. Wait. I Can Explain, Pink X-Ray, de/tonations, and Momentary Turbulence. www.bradrosepoetry.com
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!