William Prindle has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest Apologizing to Ferlinghetti You never took the deal the hand America dealt what did you have to lose anyway father and mother dead or gone mad you spoke French first so why not bat the English words way out there fungoes of the mind screw the form screw the State just write and how you wrote wrote and sold sold like hell turned on the Lights published Howl screwed the Court didn’t thank the Academy that did … Continue reading Apologizing to Ferlinghetti by William Prindle→
What man would not look back when claiming a celestial voice commanded him to go away from pleasures of wine, games of chance, lust, secular music, dance, art, poetry? The men who deny life’s gifts and joy, who kneel and coerce in the name of one unknown, unseen, beyond reason or proof, men who control by unified power and fear deemed it so that woman should not turn lest she turn to a pillar of salt. The greater choice is to turn, to escape the clutches of piety and power at any cost, becoming salt … Continue reading Salt by Les Brown→
feels this way. Familiar like the abstract place you grab for when you’re curled in despair on your own kitchen floor begging to go home, not knowing where you mean. No matter whose hair and breath lend the other pillowcase its scent, which farm grew this squash so delicately sliced, whose face you lean toward, lips to their ear, cupping a joke. No matter which gone person you scan the crowd for year after year. Whitney Hudak is a CNM and poet living in Newport, R.I. Her work has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal and … Continue reading Each Year by Whitney Hudak→
I have always thought that John Donne’s metaphor of the drawing compass in “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” one of the most ingenious in English poetry. Not simply about two lovers parting, it describes a coming together through love. Another metaphor I greatly admire (along with everyone else) is the choice depicted in “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. These two ideas in juxtaposition seem to conjure the structure of ‘theme and variation’ so elemental to art: the certainty of the circle with the uncertainty of lines pointing in different directions. Not exactly opposites, perhaps, but … Continue reading Simple Instruments by Fred Wilbur→
In school we learn to lie down in the face of Evil from the skies. “Take cover,” the first commandment during air-raid drills as we duck under our desks, then “All clear.” No one dares to say that with or without these precautions, if a bomb fell, we’ll all be toast. All day we wait on the edge of seats for firehouse sirens to sound the alarm. Part of the Civil Defense system, we Boy Scouts chop trees, clear brush for a circular space deep in the Poland forest, use the logs for an … Continue reading The Cold War in Poland (Ohio) by William Heath→
Hi, this is my poem. Hi, this is my poverty. What’s that? My poverty. The poem and my poverty shake hands. Everyone ignores my trauma. I go over to my trauma, start talking to it. It tells me about a helicopter on fire. I tell my trauma I can’t talk about that. I got hypnotized to not be able to remember that. My trauma gets quiet. My poverty walks over. My poverty is drunk. My poverty wants a ride home. I realized one night, like this thunderbolt, that I’ve lived in a horror movie. I … Continue reading Hi, This is My Trauma by Ron Riekki→
It was a shower and gone quickly. The sky was only gray a short time. It reminded me of a gray fox that I spotted in the city when I went to buy two pizza slices, the unseen people that pass by us, ghosts that we think that we see out of the corner of our eye, lightning that we are not sure if we saw or not, or a rat late at night on a lonely street bolting to the drain opening. It may be me one day if I decide not to go … Continue reading Afternoon Shower by Benjamin Nash→
I heard him say it dozens of times, but the first time I said it I laughed out loud. Dad never had two extra nickels to rub together— my parents the king and queen of getting by— and, get by they did— money not nearly as important as a house full of family. He was a soft touch— never able to say no to a friend. I often wonder how he’d fare today when money is god and we worship those who have gobs and gobs of it, like we worshipped the gods of mayhem … Continue reading Millionaire by Steven Deutsch→
Speeding between the endless fields of corn and beans 70 . . . 75 . . . “This old junker might make it to 80” . . . Some girl who knows the meaning of, uh, ‘Hey hit the highway!’ I sang it, shouting it, shoulders and head rocking. I was cradled between those cornfields so well I could love the song and the singing and feel secure, even when speeding, so that the world would blur into color and sound as I jetted on my desires. Yet behind the words were the truths all … Continue reading Singing along with Mellencamp’s ‘I Need a Lover that Wont Drive Me Crazy’ by N. S. Boone→
Listening to Buckthorn “Although Wordsworth is [in the opening of The Prelude] describing the activity of composing aloud, of walking and talking, what the poetry reaches into is the activity of listening.”—Seamus Heaney I like the sound of a word in wood, of Wordsworth’s rhythm walking where the poem goes. A trail is there but muddied over. The way around crosses last fall’s soggy oak leaves. (Right sock soaked through.) Spring words shine like sun-baked bronze, and finally some signs of green: early shoots sound their syllables in a few lighted spots. It turns out … Continue reading Listening to Buckthorn and Rainbow Bridge, 2 poems by Daniel Fliegel→
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