I Wish I'd Written This

One Sentence Poems revisited

White Flowers

Some
might miss
that
split second

when
your eyes
drop
their blinds

and
your lips
begin
to open

but
for me,
as
the clouds

decide
to rest
and
every car

stops
for gas,
it’s
like noticing

that
first whiff
of
summer air

as
it pauses
beneath
my skin.

Austin Davis is a widely published poet and his first full-length collection, Cloudy Days, Still Nights, is being released by Moran Press this spring.

Where most are ... Where most are too shy or numb to investigate, you lodge, mossy and shadow, awaiting dictation. Karen Stanislaw, fighting for her right to poet, is in current wrestle with - relatives and muddier Saturnian forces - the idea that she's not honored "enough" survival and security concerns. Visitation My brother sits across from me in the prison visiting room, his jumpsuit the color of coffee-stained teeth, and says, “Keep the letters coming. Whenever I read them, I’m free.” Scott Hughes typically writes fiction much longer than one sentence. https://www.writescott.com/ The Book of Hours The sun sets on enhanced interrogation, even as it rose, exponentially, on drone strikes, like the sum of collateral damage became a euphemism, beyond our peripheral vision, & we held the shining black eye of history in our mouth, as if we imagined God in our every breath, as if we are, all of us, alone in the complicity of others. henry 7.reneau, jr. writes words in conflagration to wake the world ablaze.

Job

I carry my burdens,
sing my songs,
hold goodness within,
not much different, it seems,
than a common wooden chair,
the bells of a working clock,
an ordinary vessel of clay.

Larry Schug says, "I could be considered old, though I am terminally immature."

Wisp

Candle
flame flickers
and quickly you
turn from flesh to
silhouette and weave
through the curtains then
exit the open window and float
above the storm-swept garden where
the frogs that survived the devastation insist
to stay and croak aloud undying love to one another.

Karlo Sevilla writes from Quezon City, Philippines, and suffers from a lagging inertia of consciousness.

One Cannot Use

One cannot use
a pen and a pistol
at the same time,
and that is all
I have to say on
the subject of
poetry as therapy.

J. R. Solonche has been publishing in magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early '70s and is author of six collections of poetry.

Wind Song 

There’s so much
going on here
it's always worth
getting out of the car,
and if you listen
really quietly,
you can hear
the stream flowing
and these people
who survived
by eating weeds
and even talk
proudly about it.

Howie Good is on the pavement, thinking about the government.

Guthertz

I wish I’d met him after
I stopped hating myself,
for he was kinder than I was,
more easily pleased, and unlike me,
comfortable seeming feminine,
which made him more masculine
as he slowly bit and sucked my lips
until they stung slightly,
vibrating, his blunt hands warm
and strong as we embraced
by a lawn sprinkler,
ratty jeans sodden,
heard atonal wind chimes,
our breath catching,
and a breeze rustling
through the eucalyptus.

Hannah Bleier is a special education teacher living in Brooklyn.

Ballast

I ride the air balloon
of your love, soaring

higher and higher as
I drop the ballast overboard:

my ego, that anvil,
that anchor made of lead.

Steve Klepetar knows it's the month before the month of May, and spring comes slowly up this way.


One Sentence Poems is a poetry site I subscribe to by email. I have shared pieces from it before, and thought it was time for some more.

They tend to be short. Not that they have to be, but it must be harder to sustain a very long sentence. The rules say:

• It must truly be a sentence. 
• Start with an uppercase letter. 
• End with a terminal punctuation mark. But don’t die. 
• Semicolons are discouraged, especially when used to merge what should be multiple sentences into one long sentence. 
• Format: There must be at least one line break. Some indents ok, but we can’t handle highly scattered formats. (We prefer left-justified.) 
• The sentence must be grammatically correct (subject + verb), with generally conventional punctuation. 

I've selected from recent posts a few I particularly like, for whatever reason – whether because they are beautiful or interesting (some are downright disturbing!); whether because of content or form. There were many more worth sharing; I selected for variety. 

Every time I read one, I think, 'I must try a one sentence poem!' (and also when I sometimes find one amongst the poems shared in our Poets United community). But then I forget. One day....

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.

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.