Category Archives: sonnets

Sonnet: Martin Elster, ‘Axis Denied’

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Earth, always the same distance from her star,
induced no crane to migrate, lark to sing,
chorus frog to trill, violet to spring,
nor leaves to turn. The solstice was as far
as the edge where galaxies all disappear.
The sun kept glaring down, as on that shore
where, from your tower, you chose to ignore
the thing I most desired. Wasn’t it clear?
Earth didn’t tilt. Her poles were locked in glaze,
sea level never changed, and when I walked
forever round your roost, you never talked
of waves, or even sensed the sun-launched rays
till yesterday when, with a sudden lurch,
Earth tipped and threw you off your chilly perch.

*****

Martin Elster writes: “The title “Axis Denied” works in two ways. Literally, it refers to a world without axial tilt, and therefore without seasons or change. Phonetically, “axis” echoes “access”—suggesting denied emotional entry or withheld intimacy—until a sudden shift finally breaks the stasis.”

Martin Elster, who never misses a beat, was for many years a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. He finds contentment in long woodland walks and writing poetry that often draws on the natural world and on scientific ideas, from animal life to larger planetary and cosmic patterns. His honors include Rhymezone’s Poetry Contest (2016) co-winner, the Thomas Gray Anniversary Poetry Competition (2014) winner, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Poetry Contest (2015) third place, five Pushcart Prize nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination. His latest collection is From Pawprints to Flight Paths: Animal Lives in Verse (Kelsay Books).

This poem appears in Bewildering Stories #1122. His work has also appeared in the anthology Outer Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press) and in the Potcake Chapbooks Careers and Other Catastrophes, Robots and Rockets, and City! Oh City!

Image: “‘SNOWBALL EARTH’ – 640 million years ago” by guano is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Susan McLean, ‘The Other Woman’

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What makes you think your husband’s what I want?
Does he think that? He’s dumb as mud, if so.
To me, a man’s a fast-food restaurant,
just grab and go. Maybe that hurts to know,
but joints like that are everywhere—and packed.
It’s not a lifetime contract; it’s a meal.
I don’t do long-term. Obstinates attract.
I’m bad for him. He knows. Big fucking deal.

Nobody has a long attention span
these days. So, what do you do when you’re bored?
Binge-watch TV, drink white wine, find a man?
You want security, but feel ignored
and miss that fizz of come what may. Guess what:
we all end up alone. You think you’re not?

*****

Susan McLean writes: “This poem got its start as an entry to a sonnet contest held by the online journal Better Than Starbucks in 2019. It won the contest, appeared in the journal, and was later reprinted in Extreme Sonnets II. I like the dramatic monologue form, and once I thought of the situation, an “other woman” being confronted by the outraged wife of the man she has slept with, the voice of a woman with an attitude just came to me.

“Ironically, the poem’s content was influenced by my experience of teaching students to write essays in a college composition class. One of the subjects I typically had them write about was the obesity epidemic in America, what was causing it, and how the situation might be improved. I was surprised to learn that my students were often angry on being told that fast food might be hurting them. Many of them had been raised on it, loved it, and depended on it because it was what they could afford. They did not want to be informed of how many calories it contained or what it might be doing to their health. But the other influence on the poem was my sympathy for anyone trying to start a relationship in an era of short attention spans, instant gratification, and online dating sites. There’s a lot of loneliness out there, and not just among single people.

“Finally, for me what makes this sonnet work is the underlying humor in what is a very uncomfortable situation. The wife, who initiates the confrontation, seems to want the other woman to back off, but finds that the woman has no particular interest in the husband, and that the husband is only pursuing her because she is not interested in him. The wife is further thrown off balance when the other woman suggests that the two women have more in common than the wife may want to believe. When a clichéd situation doesn’t turn out the way you expect it to, the element of surprise contributes to the humor.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “The Other Woman” by Professor Bop is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Amit Majmudar, ‘Homing’

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My parents stacked the best years of their youth as
Bricks to build me. Taught me words I taught
Myself to shout them down with when we fought.
My parents loved me, though I could be ruthless
Hurting myself with things I poured or burned
And those who loved me with the things I said.
My parents never gloated once I learned,
Just held me through my sobs, and kissed my head.

Now, in the living room I stormed out of,
They tell me I can stay the month, or year,
Because my room will never not be here
No matter where I go, or who I love.
I am their blood, they tell me. I depart
From them as blood does from a beating heart.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “A homing pigeon knows where its home is by training, as the falcon knows the falconer’s arm. But there are deeper instincts at work in nature that science still struggles to explain fully, like the way birds know how to migrate by looking at the stars, and the way monarch butterflies find their way to the same vast swath of oyamel trees in Mexico every year. Human beings have something of that in them. Not just for the neighborhoods where we grew up, but for the people, the family, who were there with us. This poem is about that. I distinctly recall its writing; I woke up at the “witching hour,” as I often do, while visiting my sister-in-law’s house in Texas over Christmas break. Ten family members were asleep in the same house, and, unable to fall back asleep, I picked up my phone and found an invitation to submit to a new sonnet journal in my inbox. Immediately, still in the awoken, excited, “witching hour” state (which the Indian tradition calls the Hour of Brahma, the time of peak creativity), I wrote this poem about the bond between the far-afield child and the fixed star of family, first line to last.”

‘Homing’ was just published in The Sonneteer which can be accessed at thesonneteer@substack.com. It offers a free, partial service as well as an upgraded paid subscription.

Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025). More information about his novels and poetry collections can be found at www.amitmajmudar.com.

““There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart…pursue those.”~Michael Nolan” by katerha is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

My own favourites: Sonnet: RHL, ‘Death Will Be Harsher Now’

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Death will be harsher now, as, year by year,
we solve the clues of immortality:
emotions sink to animality
as false hopes tighten screws of desperate fear.
Hormone control will make age disappear—
after false starts, most horrible to see—
but those already old must beg to be
frozen for the genetic engineer.
While war, starvation, pipe Earth’s gruesome jigs,
successful businessmen will fight to gain
some dead teen’s body, to transplant their brain,
the already-old beg to be guinea-pigs.
Children, look back, hear our despairing cry:
we bred immortals, but we had to die!

*****

I wrote this poem on 3 January 1982 – twenty years before I began to get poems published. (Formal verse was an almost absolute no-no in late 20th century magazines… although consistently taught and highly praised in schools and universities, of course.) It was finally published in Ambit in October 2007 – the magazine started and managed for 50 years by Martin Bax and the stomping ground of J.G. Ballard, Ralph Steadman, Carol Ann Duffy, etc.

In April 2018 the poem was reprinted in Bewildering Stories, an online weekly headquartered in Guelph, Ontario; and in 2024 I accepted Maryann Corbett‘s suggestion to change the title and first line and instead of “harder” use the word “harsher”… the earlier word incorrectly suggesting that we might be finding it more difficult to achieve death.

The ideas behind the poem were not new to science fiction, but were less common in formal verse. The ideas continue to inch their way towards reality; continue to be explored in popular culture (Piraro, Futurama…); and in the last 44 years I have continued to explore SF and existential themes in verse.


Cartoon: “piraro brain transplant” by Dreaming in the deep south is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Semi-formal Sonnet: Rachel Hadas, ‘Out of Reach’

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Our lost ones drift down a dark stream,
surfacing at the brink of dream.
The crack of dawn: they’re gone again.
What have they left for us to keep?
Night’s dialect, a coded speech
beyond our reach.

Birds on the bank of a calm pond:
each one is still and poised, then dives.
Mornings we wake into our lives,
blind to what lies beyond, below,
the chasms where black rivers flow,
and flickering deeper, darkly clear,
that coded speech beyond our reach,
words we can’t hear.

*****

Rachel Hadas has a group of sonnets appearing, one a week, in The Sonneteer. For the first she wrote: “The sonnets that will be appearing in the coming weeks weren’t conceived as a sequence. Encouraged by Ken Gordon’s enthusiasm to take a look at some of my unpublished shorter poems, I speedily found one fourteen-liner, “Tectonic Plates.” Three other poems were so close to sonnet length that they almost begged to be tweaked or tightened or gently expanded; this group includes “Out of Reach,” “Winter,” and “My Best Friend’s Mother.” In every case, the sonnetification (Ken’s helpful coinage) improved the poem. (…) I now realize that, while not conceived as a sequence, all five of these sonnets (now that they are all sonnets) do share themes. They’re about time and memory, aging and loss, what we lose and what we retain. So are many other sonnets, infinitely greater than mine. It’s a privilege to be able to join in the conversation, to swell the chorus.“

Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

https://www.rachelhadas.net/

Photo: “Kingfisher fishing” by Bob Hall Photos is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Jerome Betts, ‘Fly-By’

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(For S. H. W.)

Bench slats, warm-sleeved in lichen’s rough grey-green,
Sandwiches, ivy’s shade, the garden scene,
Dozens of white-tailed bumblebees, a hum
Among the clustered heads of marjoram.

Background to thoughts that intertwine and drift . . .
A sudden sombre sickle shape – a swift
So low, so near, not distant in the sky,
Skims past, a flash of wings and beak and eye.

Why come that strangely close? Drawn down in chase
Of food, despite the human form and face?
Why did it circle once, then speed away
Towards the woods and cliffs that fringe Lyme Bay?

Soon, news – an old friend gone whose joy was birds.
It almost seemed a farewell without words.

*****

Jerome Betts writes: “The passage of the swift so close I could glimpse its shining eye was a memorable moment in these times when I see only a very occasional two or three usually high in the sky. It resulted in a sunny and summery ten lines concluding, A brief encounter, but it made the day. Some hours later the news came of an old school friend’s death in France. This completely altered any feeling about the event. I suppose the subtext of the aftermath was something like Hardy’s Hoping it might be so, which nearly became the title.”  

‘Fly-By’ was first published in Snakeskin.

Jerome Betts edits Lighten Up Online in Devon, England. His verse appears in Amsterdam Quarterly, Light, The Asses of Parnassus, The New Verse News, The Hypertexts, Snakeskin, and various anthologies.

Photo: “Swift (Apus apus)” by Billy Lindblom is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Couplets or sonnet? Julia Griffin, ‘Five Act Players’

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After Shakespeare

Update: the world—in other words, the brain—
Has stages, yes, but scientists explain
That those old seven are in fact chimeras:
Five’s the true number of our mental eras.
First you’re an infant, puking still and mewling.
Then you turn nine and gripe about your schooling.
At thirty-two, you’re all grown up, so show it
By acting like a soldier, or a poet.
At sixty-six, it’s time for eating chicken
And learning law. If still alive and kickin’
When eighty-three comes round, your life’s adventures
Will shrink to hunting slippers, specs, and dentures.
So that’s the scoop. Of course you’re free to spike it;
We know truth isn’t always as you like it.

“Brain has five ‘eras’, scientists say—with adult mode not starting until early 30s:
Study suggests human brain development has four pivotal ‘turning points’ at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83″
—The Guardian

*****

Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” speech from ‘As You Like It’, updated by current scientific thinking…

Julia Griffin lives in south-east Georgia/ south-east England. She has published in Light (including with Five Act Players in Light’s Poems of the Week), LUPO, Mezzo Cammin, and some other places, though Poetry and The New Yorker indicate that they would rather publish Marcus Bales than her. Much more of her poetry can be found through this link in Light.  

“Steel Dust: Young and Old” by LarimdaME is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Sonnet: Barbara Loots, ‘An Old Man Makes Chili for Lunch’

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Do you have a poem for an old man making chili for lunch? Like watery eyes from onion crunching–sneezing from pepper thrown… email from Dad 5/5/05

He shoves the onion pieces in a pile
to one side as he chops and chops some more.
This cutting board has lasted quite a while
through salty tears of choppers gone before,
but no use buying new equipment now.
Sometimes there’s comfort in a kitchenette
that holds what downsized spaces will allow
of former habits. He will not forget
those other hands that held this knife and chopped
for slaw and meatloaf, casseroles and stew,
and apple walnut salad. When they stopped,
he stepped up, making chili, making do,
sneezing on pepper, living on his own.
He cooks for one, but never eats alone.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “Almost any story can be told in the compass of a sonnet. This one became an elegy cooked up in the mundane of a real moment.”

This sonnet was collected in ‘Road Trip’ (Kelsay Books, 2014)

After decades of publishing her poems, Barbara Loots has laurels to rest on, but keeps climbing.  The recent gathering at Poetry by the Sea in Connecticut inspired fresh enthusiasm. Residing in Kansas City, Missouri, Barbara and her husband Bill Dickinson are pleased to welcome into the household a charming tuxedo kitty named Miss Jane Austen, in honor of the 250th birthday year of that immortal. She has new work coming in The Lyric, in the anthology The Shining Years II, and elsewhere. She serves as the Review editor for Light Poetry Magazine (see the Guidelines at  lightpoetrymagazine.com)

Photo: “Chopping Onions” by TheDarkThing is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Jean L. Kreiling, ‘Kitchen Cabinet Game’

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It matters to me, much more than it should,
that drinking glasses stand sorted by size,
that bowls are neatly nested, that my good
dessert plates sparkle in their stack. The prize
that perfect order grants is hard to name.
It isn’t peace, exactly, but a sort
of temporary triumph in a game
that never ends, played not on field or court
but on these shelves, a three-dimensional
ungridded Scrabble board where dishes make
the words, unspellable but meaningful;
a plate misplaced means an unsettling break
in symmetry and sense. Neatness may not
win much, but there are times it’s all I’ve got.

*****

Jean L. Kreiling is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Home and Away (2025). Her work has been awarded the Able Muse Book Award, the Frost Farm Prize, the Rhina Espaillat Poetry Prize, and the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Prize, among other honors.

‘Kitchen Cabinet Game’ was originally published in Crab Orchard Review.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Last Building Standing’

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When The End came, it was not the end–
it never is; the universe continues.
The millions died; I stand alone, no friend;
alone, but healthy in my bones and sinews.
One keeps on, staunchly, soldierly at post,
your day-to-day as other days have been…
though the past world (or you) is just a ghost,
a relic, fragment, hint, more felt than seen.
I’ve lived beyond my time; my world has gone,
my car-charged streets, my teeming meeting rooms,
the close-packed skyline-scrapers now redrawn
as nascent forest, trees standing as tombs
where flocks of birds replace friends whose lives fled,
with ghostly unseen me alone not dead.

*****

‘Last Building Standing’ is a Shakespearean sonnet, first published by The Orchards Poetry Journal. The Winter 2025 issue is now live on Amazon, as well as the Kelsay Books website.

Image: ‘Abandoned Skyscraper’ by RHL and ChatGPT