David Hughes is the 1st place winner of Streetlight‘s 2026 Poetry Contest

This is the silence with a fault line.
Not a void, but a region
freshly mapped. The sofa’s middle
is a no-man’s-land, a treaty’s definition.
The air is parceled into spheres of influence:
yours, by the cold fireplace, mine, by the window
where I watch the rain. A sentence
would be an incursion. A glance, a border violation.

We have become two different pressures.
You, a high front of resistance.
I, a low system of conjecture.
The weather in this room requires distance
of precisely nine feet. Any less, and the tension
might spark—the wrong kind of fusion, a brief
flash to prove we’re still alive,
but not which side.

Our silence has texture. It is the scratch
of your page-turn. The quiet my watch
keeps, ticking on my wrist, a countdown
I won’t name. We are listening
so hard to each other not speaking
the house itself grows loud. The ceiling
creaks. The fridge door’s sigh is a small leak
in the diplomatic seal. A cup you lift
and set down without drinking is a provocation.

Your weight shifts—
the topography of your jeans, I refuse to read.

This is the work of the silent:
two people building a separate nation
from the rubble of a single question.
We draft its laws in our heads—
for the next word, the next breath.

We tend this quiet like a field of stone,
wait to see which of us will break
and speak—
and in speaking, lower the flag.

David I. Hughes is a British writer who lives in Cornwall, where he divides his time between writing, photography, and exploring the coast. After a career in marketing and many years of international travel, he moved to Cornwall to pursue the creative work he had long postponed. Much of his writing is rooted in Cornwall’s landscapes, old industries, and the lives shaped by them. Recent achievements include Bridport shortlisting in both fiction and poetry, the October Project Poetry Grand Prize, and a semifinalist place in the LitFox Poetry Book Award. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including The Ana, The Esthetic Apostle, The Berlin Review, Poetose, London Grip, Superpresent, and Sky Island, among others as well as a number of anthologies such as Hermitage Press’s Salt & Stone and Four Tulips’s Out at Sea.