we imagine she was a bride the skeleton with the small skull a Greek girl………… ……….her head wreathed in ceramic flowers in Azerbaijan……………… ….800 BC a couple was buried where they fell asphyxiated……………. ……by toxic gas their bones circled around each other 700 years ago two people in England were buried their bodies dusted……………. ……with pollen we hope it was … Continue reading Currency by Maureen Clark
Cottonwood trees are producing more fluff. I am jealous of things so aptly named. The verb take can be a phrasal verb with so many meanings: take off, take up, take in, take away. If I had a name it would be the sound of a bird making its nest in the empty gutter. It would be the sound of wings flitting over roofs, a thirst without forecast, a number so vast it doesn’t need to be counted. How about a name so simple you forget it ever meant something? A name that takes nothing … Continue reading Names by Esther Sadoff
They’re the last to disappear, along with hickory, spicing the ground from mid-autumn through December. I stumble over carpets of the fermenting harvest, some greasy and quick to roll an ankle if you aren’t careful. Juniper and Bittersweet, the other malingerers, droop along the walnut path leading to a new year. So often on these daily walks, I gaze around to see something I recognize, looking to the ground that remembers what happened here, last year and years before. Otherwise, the busy mind by habit, locks itself into its present worries, generally things that can’t … Continue reading Walnuts by Sharon Perkins Ackerman
I inhaled the soot-sotted grime of New York’s summer, exhaled your scent: lavender and rose. Let me explain, because you had gone to Yankee Stadium solo, or with someone else, who knows. Certainly not me, who always inhaled whatever blackness New York offered, you always said. The Yankees were in town, winning or losing I don’t know, you’d be surprised to hear, with all the cards, keychains, jerseys, helmets, autographs. The Mantles and Marises, the Judges and Jeters, the Ruths and Rodriguezes. You name it. I pictured you in that pinstripe jersey I had bought … Continue reading Away Games by E. H. Jacobs
More than one has said it: that love is of this world only the world of a willow reaching for a river as the river goes its way and of a nuthatch nesting in a beechwood tree as light devolves from day into night The true reckoning of this world is the way we come to know things twice in the wonder first and then the remembering the bitterroot blossom before it fades and everything else we lose but love anyway. A native of Baton Rouge, La., Michael Blanchard now lives in the Cadron Valley … Continue reading The Things of This World by Michael Blanchard
Looking for Theopista who is called a saint, painted by Lippi who is called by Browning a brothel-john in monk’s clothing and, in the poem, admits his out-of-boundsness, and paints Job nearby with a label “Job” and made long love to a nun and got away with it because, rich Cosimo de Medici the Elder told anyone who would listen, Lippi was a heavenly form in fleshy flesh, no dray horse he. Looking for and finding the woman of the lost-luggage cab. And finding the woman of middle-age elegance pushing a wheelchair. And finding the … Continue reading A First Visit to the Uffizi by Patrick T. Reardon
William Prindle has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2025 Poetry Contest The Orchardist’s Lament If I spent less time in unstructured circumspection and dreadful inference I might remember that circumference is nothing but pi times diameter and I might not have to rue the mismeasurements I make in fencing these apple trees from noisy birds and sneaky squirrels. I might not keep repeating what a dolt to myself as I continue to overlook my own advice and nurse my sore thumbs from recutting and rebending this eighteen-gauge wire, when all these years I could … Continue reading The Orchardist’s Lament by William Prindle
John Thelin has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2025 Poetry Contest Pennies from Heaven Soon they will stop minting pennies. I will miss their crusty copper ridges, Abe Lincoln in profile, a calming image as he stares into a future he could never imagine over 150 years ago. Time stretches, an elastic band, for a while, then snaps back on itself, leaves a welt on a wrist that tries to flick a fishing line perfectly into a pond on a lazy summer day that can cloud over while you doze, wake to a smell … Continue reading Pennies from Heaven by J. R. Thelin
I know at least four Virginia poets with books published this year so it seems timely to recommend some fall reading, gifting, or perhaps simply to raise awareness of our local bards. There is also the matter of reverence for place and all writing that is a reflection of our chosen hill, where our consciousness plays out, our miracle of aliveness, our thousands of breakfasts and tying of shoelaces. There is also, I confess, a splash of self-promotion. That said, I hope this list leads at least a few people into the mystery of one … Continue reading Local’s Corner by Sharon Perkins Ackerman
If the river is a metaphor for life and death, for time, and loss of time, for the rise and fall of seasons, for disastrous floods that carry hope downstream and leave stinking mud in its place, what then, when a river dies? You can see the river from atop concrete steps with granite tread that lead from the cobblestone along the current’s edge to the manicured grass and pruned trees of federal land beneath the stainless-steel legs of the Arch. The Museum of Westward Expansion is closed for renovation. This river was once the … Continue reading Ephemeral Streams by Richard Stimac