I Wish I'd Written This

Pleasures of the Inbox 2: One Sentence Poems Stephen Toft Tanka Poem The ocean reclaims the seashell, reclaims the sound of itself.

Stephen Toft is a poet and homelessness worker who lives with his girlfriend and their children in Lancaster, UK.

Brad Rose

The Angry Dead

During the excavation,
relatives were forbidden
from viewing the skeletons,
which made them very angry.

(A found poem, lines taken from “Bring Out the Dead: How Archeologists Think About Mortality,” Times Literary Supplement, Oct 28, 2016, p.13)

Brad is the author of Pink X-Ray from Big Table Publishing and three chapbooks from Right Hand Pointing.

Mark Young Three Halves Halfway through the night, with the moon halfway through its four- week cycle, I rise  to take in the night  air, leaving behind  a poem that is  halfway to nowhere Mark Young's most recent books are Mineral Terpsichore, from gradient books of Finland, & The Chorus of the Sphinxes, from Moria Books in Chicago.  Michele Stepto The Unfinished Poem  It is not like seeing a bear loping across your path ahead of you on the road in the evening light its fur rippling over its muscles and blacker than the dark coming on, as black as licorice or anthracite as it finds its opening into the twilit woods and you idly wonder what errand this moderate hurry might serve and whether this particular bear, however black he might seem, could possibly be the Norwegian White Bear King ambling the woods toward the castle and the princess waiting there, waiting so they write to marry a bear and change him back into a man after sleeping with him (no questions asked and never catching sight of his true shape) for three or four nights (just feeling his fur in the dark, silky and soft and neither black nor white) or else that Penobscot boy who got lost in the woods and was taken in by a family of bears who loved him despite his being human, though he wasn't that for long, not after the bear hair sprouted and grew and covered him up right down to his plantigrade feet, so that one morning when he caught a salmon between his teeth and ate it raw and at first bite

began to bark with joy, just like a bear, his new
mama looked on with pride
at the sight

of this child of hers with his silky hair and his funny snout
and his sharp, sharp eyes
not quite

a bear yet, but coming along nicely, she thought.

Michele Stepto's work has appeared online at Verse-Virtual, What Rough Beast (at Indolent Books), NatureWriting, Mirror Dance Fantasy and Lacuna Journal.

James Hamby

Lachesis 

Every winter
I saw her through the snow,
glinting in my eye like jagged ice,
unreachable at the edge of perception.

James Hamby won the blue ribbon in the sack race at his elementary school three years in a row.

As you can see, the one sentence poem is a versatile form, which can be very short or quite long. 

I keep thinking I must try a one-sentence poem of my own some day. Meanwhile, I love all these.

One Sentence Poems is an online journal. I have subscribed to it by email, and every morning I receive the latest post.  I am always struck by their variety and inventiveness.

The 'About' section says:

We publish poems made up of a single sentence. We typically publish a single poem 5 days a week.

Your editors are Dale Wisely and Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco.

Thanks to co-founder Robert Scotellaro for co-editing OSP 2014-2016.

Please submit!

Material shared in 'I Wish I'd Written This' is presented for study and review. Poems, photos and other writings remain the property of the copyright owners, usually their authors.