Sharon Perkins Ackerman holds an M.Ed from the University of Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Places, Still: The Journal, Meridian, Blue Mountain Review, Kestrel, and various others. She is the winner of the Hippocrates Poetry in Medicine international poetry contest, London 2019. Her second poetey collection A Legacy of Birds will be published in 2025 (Kelsay Books)
I ready myself to read poetry for a group of graduate students. They’ve had the ingenuity to find an old, abandoned chapel near campus and turn it into a poetry space. Eavesdropping from a pew, I find myself listening once again to choruses of before; before the first published book, before marriages and mortgages and self-support. There are lots of munchies—I’ve forgotten how hungry students are, how irregular the meals. There are students reading poems from phones rather than spiral notebooks, whose edges might as well be the coiling of years between us. There is … Continue reading A Place to Hold Us by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
Keeping Time The mayfly lives two days, a swallowtail butterfly two weeks. The last generation of monarchs born each year endure for months flying the hundred mile a day migration, ribbons, orange and black, unfurl high across the sky. Dragonfly nymphs thrive five years in streams hiding under roots and rocks. Arctic woolly bear caterpillars chew willow leaves for seven. Spiders spin their silk orb webs for twenty years, liquid in their abdomens pulled out as threads by gravity, like water stiffening to icicles. A human life is to the lives of stars as the … Continue reading Keeping Time and Awake in the Night, 2 poems by Patricia Hemminger→
When I encounter a word I don’t know I check the books and screens. Even after that, there remain words I cannot find the meaning of. Some are multisyllabic thefts from languages not mine. Some might be mis-spellings or typos that look correct until not. Some congregate in sentences but so many just sit there refusing to surrender meaning. And then there are the words I always thought I knew: tree, rain, stone, island, myself. Michael Penny was born in Australia and now lives on an island near Vancouver, BC. He pursues his interest in … Continue reading Ignorance by Michael Penny→
…………………………for John Kander Music plays in my head, and I listen. Sounds and rhythms, echoes and vibrations. This is how I move through space, how I comprehend my world. Long, long ago, when I was a baby in Kansas City, I caught tuberculosis. In those days, there was no cure. Isolated on a sleeping porch, I learned to match the sounds of approaching footsteps with the ones who made them. But footsteps go both ways. A residue of loneliness lingers after all these years. Music is the antidote. Anne Whitehouse’s poem, “Outside from the Inside,” … Continue reading The Composer by Anne Whitehouse→
I just bought an eight-pack of bony Jesuses, an Amazon special, to be sure Jesus remembers this little lamb if I run a red light or ease through a stop sign as an 18-wheeler rolls through I also bought eight fuzzy rabbits’ feet on fake gold chains in case I need good luck when stopped by a crotchety cop who had a serious spat with her husband this morning when she discovered condoms in his back pocket I will hang a dangling Jesus on my rearview mirror on even numbered days and the rabbit’s foot … Continue reading Equal Opportunity by Claire Scott→
Not thinking about it doesn’t make it go away. Recollection makes sense of it, invents details from the misremembered: as with open carry and its fine print—no one flinches when the guy walks into McDonalds, a large pistol strapped to his waist and orders a Big Mac, hold the pickles, and the young man at the register says it always has pickles. When you’ve got a pistol strapped to your waist you can’t help resting your hand on its polished blue-black handle with faux pearl inlay on the grip, and the young man at the … Continue reading How Pain Matters by Mark Simpson→
Autumn is officially over, leaves finally cleared, trees naked, winter sky a show of planets that begins early with Venus glazing the western sky. It’s time to dwell briefly at the door between the old year and new one, beginning with the month (January) named after the Roman god Janus. In mythology, Janus is depicted with two faces, one looking forward into the future, the other looking back into the past. Often shown holding a key, he is the protector of thresholds, gates, and openings. I spend New Year’s Day flipping back through my calendar, … Continue reading New Year by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
Stealing Japanese poetry requires great skill, almost Ninja-like stealth, especially at night when there are so many poets out viewing the moon and, in Winter, the snow. But it’s best not to do it then because your tracks can easily be traced back to the scene of the crime. In Spring there’s not enough leaves to hide behind. But if you wait until Summer, when trees are fat and thick with green, then it will be hard to see the moon when it first rises. And always be careful in Autumn— the haunting sound of … Continue reading Stealing Japanese Poetry by Robert Harlow→
If I do a search for poems with the word light in the title, I get 12,600 hits. For dark, I get 6,000. This doesn’t scratch the surface of how many times “light” appears buried within stanzas. Can it be that we poets, blackly contemplative as we’re perceived, are at least twice as obsessed with light as darkness? After the leaves fall and days shorten, we begin to make our own light. Red and green and blue twinkle up and down my road, colored stars sprinkle rooftops of barns. We offer this glow to the … Continue reading Mehr Licht by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
SUCHNESS Unable to find a bait station, the termite guy says Call me when you’ve trimmed all this. I say It’s supposed to be this way, a cottage garden of its own making and movement, a profusion that sees beyond any preordained order. He sees only thorns, a cloud of white climbers disappearing the stone path. So much suchness is good for the soul. Lord, I’ve tried to tame it, but let me not try to suppose where or what it should be but its own labial pink, its own gallop across borders and walls. … Continue reading SUCHNESS and DITCH LILIES, 2 poems by Linda Parsons→
Streetlight Magazine is the non-profit home for unpublished fiction, poetry, essays, and art that inspires. Submit your work today!
