2017 Pushcart Nominations

fireworks over Sydney, Australia
 

2017 was an amazing year for Streetlight Magazine owing to the excellent content submitted by writers and poets from all over the world. Our editors chose six nominees for The Pushcart Prize (best of small presses) for excellent writing in non-fiction, poetry, and short fiction. We would like to publicly acknowledge these six authors for their incredible talent and wish them future success. Thank-you for allowing Streetlight Magazine to publish your work! Essay/Memoir nominees: Alex Joyner for Spirit Duplicator Anne Carle Carson for Sliding Poetry nominees: Linda Nemec Foster for Blue Brian Koester for Where … Continue reading 2017 Pushcart Nominations

Some Stories by Claire Scott

a furled brown leaf against a pale gray background
 

Some stories last long past their appointed hour, like light from expired stars. Like leftover houseguests or five day fish. We walk toward remnants of the past like refugees, pulled by the gravity of guilt, the pulse of regret. Is it too late to unspool the alphabet of cruelty, the bludgeon, the blindness, the heated blade of anger? Words cutting like winter-raw wind. Some stories stick like late fall leaves, wrinkled and ready, but clinging to the apple tree like a drowning man to a raft. the drumbeat of regret stranded in the long syllables … Continue reading Some Stories by Claire Scott

Laundry by Charlie Brice

Photo of woman hanging colorful blankets drier
 

Fat Auntie Ursal with her coffee-breath, baggy pink house dress, and worried rosary beads would haul a basket of linen to the backyard, pick clothespins out of her mouth, and staple sheets to the line. When it rained, I rushed to watch Auntie panic-waddle into our backyard, eyes wide, rosary flying, as she pulled down the pristine sheets as if lowering the mainsail in a gale. Later, she’d plead with Uncle Pete to buy a dryer, but he couldn’t hear her over the sound he made while sucking food bits out of the crevasses between … Continue reading Laundry by Charlie Brice

Dream House by Wendy Fontaine

Color photo of large house
 

Wendy Fontaine is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight‘s 2023 Essay/Memoir Contest An itchy palm means you’re going to come into some money. That’s what my dad always said. Whenever the tingling sensation hit, we’d walk around our mobile home holding out our hands and scratching at the skin as if to say, look, the money could already be on its way. Back then, I chalked it up to Italian superstition, the overriding principle that we could cultivate luck by tossing salt over our shoulders or avoid trouble by steering clear of black cats and … Continue reading Dream House by Wendy Fontaine

The Open Shed by Mark Belair

ramshackle cottage in old cemetery
 

With its double doors swung wide and its mower rolled out and parked beside bags of spring grass seed, the open cemetery shed makes each grave seem yet more sealed, more weighted down by the hard ground, the gardener’s ministrations to the earth’s mere surface exposed, those deep below tended only by the natural force— cleansing as wind on the headstones— of handed-down remembrances until the dead are swept of all particulars except their role with regard to the living, so become blank and beautiful, icons of generational endurance, each clan—when gathered for a new, … Continue reading The Open Shed by Mark Belair

New Work by Edward Michael Supranowicz


 

  I grew up studying and using traditional methods and materials in painting, printmaking, and drawing, learning the characteristics and limitations of each. Digital art, using programs such as GIMP and Photoshop, now allows me to use its blending options and the fact that digital paint is never actually “wet” nor will a digital drawing smudge, to combine different methods and schools of painting into a blend that otherwise would not be possible. Old master’s techniques can be combined with alla prima painting, one layer can be abstract expressionist but blended with another which is … Continue reading New Work by Edward Michael Supranowicz

Atheist and Not Now, Maybe Not Ever, 2 poems by Claire Rubin Scott


 

Atheist At seven I stopped believing in Santa after Mary Lou whispered to me betrayed by adults lured into an unreal world I stopped believing in the tooth fairy with her late night dimes, the Easter Bunny with jelly beans and pastel eggs and God But I am not a good atheist I slip into the back of Saint Anthony’s some Wednesdays at noon and sit in silence with the stained glass saints I read Simone Weil, longing for her unwavering faith if we ask our Father for bread he does not give us a … Continue reading Atheist and Not Now, Maybe Not Ever, 2 poems by Claire Rubin Scott

A morbid month by D. S. Maolalai

Photo of desert road
 

a lot of roadkill lately. one sign of summer’s approach. dead foxes— dead birds especially. and once, on the main road driving toward blessington, an otter—an almost intact thing, a torso as thick as cracked leadpipe, lying down on the lines which bisected the lanes, and everyone swerving about it. april is indeed a morbid month, and it’s dishonest— sun striking the tarmac like water and drawing things in. daffodils rise, draping forward fat flowers with curl in the neck of a landed and interested vulture. folding its wings at the verges of roadside. strutting, … Continue reading A morbid month by D. S. Maolalai

What’s Not Broken by Charles Brice

cricket in green grass
 

……………………………………………………………Inspired by, “What’s Broken,” ………………………………………………………………………………….Dorianne Laux The little boy who only wanted to be rocked on his mother’s lap grows to desire nothing more than to hop in his baby blue Mercury Comet and drive far away from her. The lovers who spent hours in embrace but grew to despise the thought of each other. The scale learned to precision eventually abandoned to atonal schemes and dissonance. The cranky white-haired genius who wrote that only two roads diverged in the wood when there were hundreds of roads, some with potholes, some never completed, some washed … Continue reading What’s Not Broken by Charles Brice

analog by Ted Jean

Photo of old car radio in pink dash
 

the fancy radio my wife gifted into my simple pickup has finally died despite all manner of punching and twirling, little instrument won’t rouse, nor even static startle, and the bright digital time sign has flown silence, salient, at first, like a big embarrassing passenger, crowds the cab I pull over, pour a bit of citrus vodka into an empty fast-food coffee cup on the crow-rowdy gravel road to the river, windows down, an old channel crackles Ted writes, paints, plays tennis with Amy Lee. Nominated twice for Best of the Net, and twice for … Continue reading analog by Ted Jean