The lilacs hid the remains of a porch it used to screen. The hints of joints and steps leading up and between. Stone remnants of a foundation, a house that used to be stolid and presentable to the world. Flush with flowers, the branches bending low, bowing under their weight, I waited, too, shifting my own meager childish weight, from one foot to the other, sifting through those parts of me solid and true, walled in by my imagination, as white-washed walls rose back into view. The air heavy with its perfume. My head … Continue reading Jack Gilbert Keeps Lilacs Alive in his Head by Deborah Doolittle→
They’re up on the branch tips, all eight legs en pointe— one hundred and four chitinous arachnids, their tutus matching leafless twigs. These spiders parse every gust, like surfers scoping wind and swell; desirous wind, wind strong and constant, like the hot custard disc of June. When it blows faithful, they hoist their buttocks, as if spiders actually had buttocks, shooting life-lines of silk into wind—wind, now a sculptor’s hands, patting and twirling the silklines into a sail, or is it a parachute; aeronauts lifting into the air as if west was the only … Continue reading When the Spring Winds are Strong, Wolf Spiders Balloon by Gary D. Grossman→
This year my credit card company sent me a birthday card. In simple red, white and blue it wished me a happy birthday from Credit One. It is nice of my credit card to put the effort in to send a physical card when an email would have done it. My mom sent a text. My credit card puts the work in. It knows how to rupture and repair. It gives double miles at thousands of convenient locations all over the world. My credit card is senpai Uwu. I’ll never have to ask for it … Continue reading Maxed Out by Jason Montgomery→
“If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.” —Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle Autumn is usually a time for renewed outdoor activity as usually summer heat and humidity subside. But usually has become a problematic qualifier. It seems that nothing in nature, in politics, in religion, or in human culture can be counted on to give us reassurance that “all’s right with the world.” My wife and I traveled recently to Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Fallingwater;” an outing which … Continue reading Water, Water, Everywhere: Lessons of Water by Fred Wilbur→
Deborrah Corr has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest The red onion is a purple globe. I hold it, let my skin adore its slick, smooth contours. Then I bear down with a knife. A slice reveals a maze. No, I’ve misspoken. I’m mistaken. There are no passages with doorways through which you wander, puzzled how to get to the center and find your way back again. Just white corridors, inescapable layers, lined in lilac. Rotating, arriving always where you started. I begin to think monotony. I think hospital hallways, blank anxiety. … Continue reading The red onion by Deborrah Corr→
Plop A Rorschach inkblot appears on the cement before me. I veer to avoid the disgusting mess. Weirdly white for a germ filled poop, I fail to find any meaning or truth in its shape. ………….Plop Another shape appears before me. Soon I will have trouble making it across the parking lot without soiling my shoes and smearing whatever truth the shape reveals. ………………..Plop Holy shit. This is no longer a test of my psychological health but a challenge to my agility and endurance. Can I see my future in this new shape? ………………………Plop The … Continue reading Plop by Mary Walsh→
for Alfred Kern,1924-2009 Search Amazon for his novel, The Width of Waters, and you get No Image Available and No Customer Reviews. Instead, you see suggestions for dry texts on hydro resource management. Yet, as if the red ink is still wet between the lines of my fictions typewritered onto now yellowing pages, his words manifest in my mind’s margins. I wonder if the storyisn’t or can’t be deeper.Press harder. Once, as a curious student, I visited his classic Victorian facing Diamond Park, watched as he released, … Continue reading Mentor by Jeanne Julian→
On the black and white TV, we watched silently, as an American soldier fell into a field of static like he was falling fast asleep, tumbling down the screen, out of sync with the signal, dropping one horizontal line at a time. Then, someone’s daughter came running out to us with her arms raised. They called her the Little Napalm Girl because she burned with Napalm’s invisible fire. She looked to be exactly my age at the time, caught on the camera in this first war, televised. My dad didn’t want me to see her, … Continue reading Little Napalm Girl by Jean Mikhail→
What Horses Say What’s to be made of the field of buttercups, a saffron sea at the bend of the road, with the three horses ….one black with white mane and tail …one coppered like a new penny ….one white as an angel a triumvirate of muscled peace and perfection. What’s to be made of thinking of 3 recently dead friends every single time I drive past the most laughably maudlin reach for meaning when the real story is simple: Time is real- the realest unseen thing undocumented, untouchable a mystery deeper than … Continue reading What Horses Say and Stains, 2 poems by Rita Quillen→
If ‘silence is golden,’ why do we squander it so foolishly? If you try finding ‘peace and quiet’ in contemporary life, you will be gob-smacked to encounter it. We praise the sounds of nature: babbling brooks, whispering leaves, bird song. And granted, there are buzzing mosquitos and growling bears, but it has been shown that humans need the restorative powers of the outdoors. When nature takes a destructive turn, we anthropomorphize its “nasty: weather, “raging” floods or describe (the sound of) tornadoes as a fast approaching freight train. Which brings us to the notion … Continue reading The Dying Art of Silence? by Fred Wilbur→
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