As a child, one of the most thrilling things to me was the story my father told about how he, at the age of ten, first encountered Indians on a dusty road near the Flandreau Santee Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He had been sent to live with relatives who homesteaded there after his mother died in the flu epidemic in 1918. These were almost fantasies to me, stories which transported me away from my insular life on a small lake in rural Michigan. But to him this was his real and often tragic life. … Continue reading The Indian Lady Who Lived in a Quonset Hut →
2nd place winner of the Streetlight 2017 Poetry Contest My Grandmother Kills a Chicken The hen house her grocery, she strode the aisles of cluck, straw, and feathers for eggs reaching under each bird for breakfast. Vegetables canned in summer did not freeze in a closet lined with newspaper in the barn heated by a single naked lightbulb. A rural palace and grounds made from a white clapboard farmhouse, a ribbed metal garage, the one-room wide long building, a hen house with flaps that rolled up on each side, and a small barn with … Continue reading My Grandmother Kills a Chicken by Guy Terrell →
1st place winner of the Streetlight 2017 Poetry Contest Thoor Ballylee Home of W.B. Yeats Massive stone, empty air, the river’s cool breath, a space the poet enters. Image stacked upon image reveals his world, not yet a poem but a current stirred by starlings sailing from oak to oak or a riverbed that shapes the flow of water. The scratch of his pen brings cows to amble across the page, black-and-white sway of bellies, breath forming ghosts, extinguished when muzzles dip into water. Kestrels stir upon a ledge, chicks pulsing with hunger the castle’s … Continue reading Thoor Ballylee by Judy Longley →
3rd place winner of the Streetlight 2017 Poetry Contest Witness It seemed an unlikely spot for a prophet, the annual library book sale in a dim warehouse on a summer day, but there she was, rocking side to side, the skirt of her lavender shirtwaist brushing pale shins above white socks and sneakers. Her fingers toyed anxiously with the clasp of her patent purse. “God came to me when I was at the Dollar General,” she said to no one in particular. “He told me to come down here to the book sale, He … Continue reading Witness by Priscilla Melchior →
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