Victoria Korth has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest Mr. Abraham You would unstick huge floor-to-ceiling windows with a metal-clawed broom handle, soak the floor where someone vomited, clear sleeted walks while we waited in line, quiet the boiler, keep water flowing in fountains, walk around the school’s perimeter in faded green pants, head down, and into the basement while in the classroom, at the window or in the hall I watched you. Although I have lived the question of how one person knows the other and accepted that we did not, … Continue reading Mr. Abraham by Victoria Korth→
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→
Luisa M. Giulianetti is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest The Pepper Jar ………………….……….for Dad Guided by the moon, you germinate seeds. Transplanting infant plants well after the final frost. Fostering them. Withhold water before the harvest to deepen their flavor, reaping a basket of red fruit adorned with green hats. Summer ’09: your last labor of horticultural love. You lay the nightshades to dry under the August sun, discarding the soft bodies. Tending never ends with the harvest. Two weeks later, their plump, glossy skin withered as a crone’s. Drying, you … Continue reading The Pepper Jar by Luisa M. Giulianetti→
Victoria Korth is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest Treatment Team Found lying in a parking lot on Union Street, close to the shelter where she’d been in flight from a husband who sex-trafficked on and off: a delusion she was prone to, one resistant to meds. Found splayed across chalk lines, knitted cap knocked off, balding head’s few strands splotched tar—she had breast cancer in addition to bipolar, you see was childlike off her meds, lost to our expertise. That’s the way it is, an ember melting us together, annealing, it … Continue reading Treatment Team by Victoria Korth→
Gina Malone is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest Why My Father Cannot Lay a Stone Wall Nearly eighty now he drags out the soft middles of words when he plunders his past, sweeping disparate bits into piles his voice steps around. I always wanted to learn how to build stone walls, he says. ……………………………………………Eyes elsewhere he tells of a man ……………………………………………he knew when he was young, ……………………………………………an old man who said he would ……………………………………………teach him how to build a wall, to lay stone level upon stones in layers of orderly precision. … Continue reading Why My Father Cannot Lay a Stone Wall by Gina Malone→
Patricia Hemminger has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest Consider the pattern of UV light directing bees to the flower’s center. Magnetic fields, unfelt by us guiding geese in migration. The low inaudible sounds elephants hear with approaching kin. That butterflies stand on a leaf to taste with their feet. Tiger moths ultrasonic clicks jam bats’ echolocation beams. And snakes have holes in their faces to detect their prey’s infrared radiation. I tell you again she is gone forever. You answer not all things can be seen. Patricia Hemminger’s experience of growing … Continue reading Out of Range by Patricia Hemminger→
Gary Beaumier has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest Once I shuffled along the wings of biplanes I know this because I always fall in my dreams from very high and unsurvivable places tugged inexorably toward cliffs by some invisible force or tumbling off high buildings When I get old and rickety like those planes I’ll take one burst of wind too many and collapse mid flight impossibly high guy wires slackened trailing struts or tail fins as they are loosed spinning rapidly toward a thicket of trees Maybe my last words … Continue reading Hello Icarus by Gary Beaumier→
Ion Corcose has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest When I first gazed upon the world, eyes like a dragonfly over a field of grass, I did not see lightning or crows, or a camel stubborn on its knees. I did not see a man pluck hair from a rabbit, rub chilli into the eye of a cow, burn a monkey with a blowtorch; telling the truth came later. I remember learning that the word for truth in Greek, aletheia, means to reveal the forgotten. Looking inside, I found Rumi eating a … Continue reading Yoghurt with Honey by Ion Corcose→
Erik Wilbur has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest As she prepares a mirepoix for the soup—her spine curled slightly over the blade, over a chipped laminate countertop—I consider that a woman can only live for so long like a stilt-house pillar in a flood. Fuck the floods of her life: . . . The flood of the drunk asleep in her bed . . . The flood of her daughter pawning heirlooms for drugs . . . Silently, I curse the ones I know of until the soup simmers. Then we … Continue reading Visiting My Mother After Her Layoff by Erik Wilbur→
Derek Kannemeyer has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest My father planted this fig tree. 25 years ago, the last time my folks visited. The flight back got too much for them-—missed connections, no sleep, lost luggage. And I put in a sapling plum, with dad’s help, but that one’s died since. I thought the fig was dying too, but on the phone, my dad just laughed. The day that fig tree dies is the day that I die. We scattered the ash of him five years ago, but his fig tree … Continue reading Ray’s Fig Trees by Derek Kannemeyer→
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