His breakfast smells like ripe tomatoes
and promises,
pledged in youth and romance,
a starter home, a child or two,
a job with promotions and perks,
naive happiness.

We are older now,
each creak and […]

When I was seven, I made my own journal out of legal pad paper—a little book that sparked a lifelong passion for writing down my thoughts, feelings and desires. E.M. Forster asks, “How do I know what I think u […]

I try to find beauty
………in the autumn night.
Your stars, your moon,
they’re still right there where you left them
………But without you
they seem merely splinters of glass
soon to be swept into w […]

The gravedigger called, annoyed that I was not at the cemetery where he was waiting to lay my father’s stone marker. I’d expected his call en route and said I would get there as fast as p […]

In Alice Sebold’s book Lucky, a memoir of her brutal rape as a college freshman, a policeman tells her she was lucky. He meant she was fortunate to have been raped and beaten rather than being raped and m […]

Our beckoning cabby
from Tunisia,
snaked through preposterous traffic,
past the icy neon signs
and the greening fragrance of stacked Christmas pines,

to the Met
where I almost cried, nearly blind
from Van […]

There are days I wake up in sluggish wonder, newly aware, as a last dream image drifts away, of the marvel of my beloved still beside me in the bed, the fan beating time through the air, and the persistence of […]

……….Hello? Is there anybody in there?
……….Just nod if you can hear me.
……….Is there anyone at home?
…………..Comfortably Numb
…………..Pink Floyd

He lay on his side
like a […]

ALLOWING THE LEAF

For an ultrasound exam, I ran on a treadmill and then was hooked up to a machine that showed my heart pumping blood. It was an incredible thing to see my heart keeping perfect time, beating […]

The Mojave, January 1988
Twenty-five months in the Army
and who would put a kid like me
in charge of a six million dollar
tank? I’ve got a crew of tragically
obedient soldiers, all teen-age, one
who m […]

These past two years and three months, since May 2017, have been a special period in my life that I hadn’t expected to experience. During my tenure as poetry editor, it has been my honor to share this labor of l […]

My father, every time I have gone home during the holidays the past two years, has been proud of his legitimacy as a businessman. He says he pays taxes upward of Rs.1 crore. He shows me his golden certificate from […]

The canary was still. It was too late to run. Too late to escape. Too late to pray for God’s mercy.

Matt had been one of the lucky ones, one of sixteen coal miners chosen to work on a Saturday mo […]

Stuart Gunter is a finalist of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Poetry Contest.
 

Finish these sentences to express your true feelings:
I always wanted to be intelligent, maybe a college
professor, or a poet. […]

Natalia Prusinska is a finalist of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Poetry Contest.
 

I took the jar of jam sealed with heat and wrapped it in old
towels. I placed it carefully in my suitcase among the […]

Writing my first novel was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It took me two full years to get through the first draft, and I felt like I was slogging my way through the entire time. I would write sections of the b […]