It’s working all of us, and all the time. Not just as obvious obsessions with diagnostic names, the car-horn ones you notice corralling someone else as you avert your eyes. Don’t be coy. Punding hums to you and me. Collect. Arrange. My mother took up figurines, blaming the Depression for her want. Myself, I go by color, size, or function for my stuff. The superego interrupts: “In this implicit way, are you not sorting people with a glance?” Eric Forsbergh’s poetry has appeared in Streetlight, Artemis, JAMA, The Northern Virginia Review, The Journal of Neurology, … Continue reading Punding by Eric Forsbergh→
A day of forgetting has its price, but a price that can’t be reckoned, because the receipt itself was shoved into a pocket, soaked in the laundry, tumbled in the dryer into a hard pebble of paper, a symbol of nothing specific enough to reconstruct a story. And what was purchased is like candle scent settling throughout the house, seeping into fabrics— curtains and couches, lampshades, sinking through the thin space between floorboards, until finally it’s so diffused there’s no trace of its floral ribbons. Which is why a day of forgetting also has its … Continue reading Handout by Michael T. Young→
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→
your father is dying on the other side of the world and yet, the moon shines into our bedroom my mother has broken her ankle and can’t walk the stairs and yet, the moon dances between clouds our daughter, plagued by night terrors, sweats in the sheets between us and yet, the moon fills our room with brightness our neighbor’s mosque was vandalized, dirty messages on the walls and yet, the moon glows over both vandals and vandalized tonight storms rage over violent seas, and fires burn across our hearts and yet, the moon holds … Continue reading and yet the moon by Nimisha Mondal→
During my older sister’s annual visit last fall, three shoe boxes came into the house with her luggage. After the usual greetings and settling in, she opened the Florsheim boxes to reveal a postcard collection. In an effort to clean out her Tennessee Victorian, a closet shelf having collapsed the week before, she decided she didn’t want them anymore: would I be interested in them? History is always a bit surprising, especially when close to one’s personal narrative. Imagine the archaeologist who digs up an artifact that totally alters the theory he has been working … Continue reading Writing History’s Happenstance by Fred Wilbur→
From the branch above, half concealed in new oak leaves, silent, the barred owl watches with giant eyes, round as the pool at my feet. Its body, is all of a piece, no indentation even for a neck. If I could reach high enough, my fingers might stroke it in one long move from head to base, flat-handed, barely a touch, feeling the slightest tickle of feather, like the way, as a child, I’d kneel by the mud puddle, hover my hand over the brown water, lower my arm bit by slow bit, trying to … Continue reading The Owl by Deborrah Corr→
Mounds of sugar beets under halogen, marooned in pressure waves like fossil dinosaur turds. Lurid thunder eggs. And always the two Lebanese brothers who walk and argue. . A six-year-old boy drowned in an irrigation ditch. His father a tethered dirigible in white Adidas. Church is headstones in hill rows wearing in an unrelenting … Continue reading Parma, Idaho by Craig Brandis→
Unlike my previous writing efforts, I am presently engaged in compiling a history of the local garden club (of all things!) The subject is not one I would have chosen and I never thought I would get my knees dirty in this way. It chose me. By way of a short history, the local garden club donated four or five boxes of their records— which begin with the founding in 1935— to the county historical society. As a member of the society, I happened upon these records and wrote four articles on them for our … Continue reading Evolution of a History by Fred Wilbur→
I am scheduled for a tri-annual colonoscopy soon and like most people, I buy into the statistics of cancer prevention, though it is not an event most people anticipate with joy. I have waited for my appointment for six months and at that have been squeezed into the hours of operation at 7:15 a.m. on Tuesday. Though our lives are for the most part based on past experiences, anticipation, by definition, deals with the unknowable future. We may not categorize anticipation as an emotion, but it can be emotional. Think of the hope of the … Continue reading Some Trepidation by Fred Wilbur→
Matt Dhillon is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight‘s 2022 Poetry Contest Arson Blistering heat, mother of me. A little gasoline makes the heart fire glow, and you can watch things grow in reverse- twigs retract, leaves reduce, logs wither, and then you want to see it undo plastic bags, bottles, couch cushions, and soon it’s marching away from you, this unmaking, sinking into particle board and rotten siding, beams and rafters, nests of mice and wasps and the barn bent down and the light leaving it. Someone struck a match and there was a … Continue reading Arson by Matt Dhillon→
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