John Thelin has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2025 Poetry Contest

Pennies from Heaven

Soon they will stop minting pennies.
I will miss their crusty copper ridges,
Abe Lincoln in profile, a calming image

as he stares into a future he could never
imagine over 150 years ago. Time stretches,
an elastic band, for a while, then snaps

back on itself, leaves a welt on a wrist
that tries to flick a fishing line
perfectly into a pond on a lazy summer

day that can cloud over while you doze,
wake to a smell of rain on the way
and ripples of thunder in the distance.

Remember gumball machines that ate up
greedily pennies you saved for the occasion
of fitting them into its slot, and turning

the crank in hopes of a red hot that burned
the roof of your mouth, delicious beyond belief,
your breath as fiery as a dragon

that could not be slain by Saint George
or by any knight on a hapless venture
to rescue a princess or secure a kingdom?

On my walks through town, I still pick up
any penny I discover on asphalt or concrete—
hey! good luck to me today and tomorrow!

as long as they are circulating, these tokens
of the past, not worthless, no, but a direct link
to almost every transaction I have made,

that last cent needed to speed home in magic
sneakers with everything I ever wanted.

J. R. Thelín’s collections of poems include Last Cha Cha in Albuquerque (2017, Main Street Rag Press) and Breath Into Bone (2010, Small’s Books), as well as three chapbooks: Those Last Few Moments of Light: Poems of the Dead Boy (Slipstream Press, 2023); The Way Out West (2005, Concrete Wolf) and Dorrance, Narrative, History (2004, Pudding House Publications). A fourth chapbook, Spin: Tales from the Diamond, is forthcoming in August 2025 from Finishing Line Press. He has served as co-coordinating editor of the Eleventh MUSE and as poetry reader for Shenandoah. Thelín retired as senior development researcher from University of Virginia at the end of 2020. He is married and lives, writes, and walks in Buena Vista, Va.