Moray McGowan is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight‘s 2026 Poetry Contest The waxwings that stripped our cherry tree’s last crop dropped guano’d stones in meadows far beyond the sea From the felled tree’s straight and amber grain we carved our firstborn’s crib From glasses perched upon the stump we toasted her first school day We watched her curl up in her fairy dell the roots left as they rotted back into earth, watched her teach her sisters reading and the facts of life she’d learned from books, her gaze on our disasters and her own … Continue reading Stone Circles by Moray McGowan→
David Hughes is the 1st place winner of Streetlight‘s 2026 Poetry Contest This is the silence with a fault line. Not a void, but a region freshly mapped. The sofa’s middle is a no-man’s-land, a treaty’s definition. The air is parceled into spheres of influence: yours, by the cold fireplace, mine, by the window where I watch the rain. A sentence would be an incursion. A glance, a border violation. We have become two different pressures. You, a high front of resistance. I, a low system of conjecture. The weather in this room requires distance of … Continue reading Nine Feet Apart by David I. Hughes→
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→
Rebecca Faulkner is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2025 Poetry Contest Father’s Day Mum says I have a new family now, matter-of-fact with the tea brewing. A half-sister who rides her shiny bike without training wheels, plush carpet hugs her staircase. Suppers in the car nights he drives me home, fish & chips steam the windows. My eyes vinegar-itch but I will not cry. Weekends he fails to fix the bird-feeder, spilling seed in my sandals while I jostle sparrows for crumbs. When he’s back I’ll make him read Charlotte’s Web, work busily like … Continue reading Father’s Day by Rebecca Faulkner→
Abby Murray is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2025 Poetry Contest Of All the Qualities She Could Have Inherited She carries my penchant for flowers she hasn’t learned to identify as weeds. she brings me dandelions, red clover, morning glories, buttercups, even scotch broom, and I prop them up in a vodka bottle on the windowsill because she can’t believe her luck, how nobody fought to collect these beauties before she did, how she found them heaped on yard waste piles or reaching up from the cement or clay beneath utility poles and … Continue reading Of All the Qualities She Could Have Inherited by Abby Murray→
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→
Tim Suermondt has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest It’s Done, Beautifully Again My wife, Pui Ying, shows me her latest poem “I hope I did what I wanted to do here.” What she did do is stark and lush, an abandoned castle, and a boulevard teeming with revelers opening the reserve of morning, a welcoming— how difficult it is to merge a heartache with a gratitude and make it work, on the page as well as in life. I tell her I may be stealing some of her images—the old dynasty … Continue reading It’s Done, Beautifully Again by Tim Suermondt→
Jonathon Chibuike Uka is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest My Sister’s Breakfast The things my sister eats for breakfast, eat me up when I think about them; five out of seven days in a week, she swallows a whole bottle of her reflection, ziggy-zagging shadows on the surface of the water, or in the sun, cast by the wind, which she drops beside her table, while her other hand picks up a granola of air. A large tray of selfies, mammoth lip-licking, and the bust of eyelashes at everyone are often … Continue reading My Sister’s Breakfast by Jonathon Chibuike Ukah→
Olivia Lee Stogner is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest Where Horses Grow Tired of Running, Hadeel’s Story Today I went to fill up drinking water. My children are doing well.here. They are children who do not know what is going on around them.Dalia is only one month old. I walked a kilometer to reach the water place. It is not your fault. We are believers. We cannot change reality. This is beyond our capabilities.W We cannot say no to America, Europe, or Israel. There are superpowers and we have been oppressed– … Continue reading The Land Where Horses Grow Tired of Running, Hadeel’s Story by Olivia Lee Stogner→
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