Because no matter the finery she wears she can’t do anything to shake her past Because she can’t seem to shake her past she’s like a long scar in a formal dress Because she trusts the zodiac to run her life she drinks according to the stars and constellations Because she drinks according to stars she counts herself wise as she downs 80-proof misery Because she knows the strength of the stock she came from she can share laughter even while possessed by sorrow Because she can laugh even while she cries she can speak … Continue reading Boxed Wine and Sad Seasons by Tobi Alfier→
For Joanne First snow has hushed the highway, yammer of distant coyotes comes to us as brittle and sharp as icicles dangling from the eaves. Without thought my mind links the stars and traces the ancient outlines –I read Orion standing roughshod on snowy Pine Mountain. No going back—once the dots are connected, those stories are etched for the duration, the stars never again a random scatter of pinpointed lights. The same for speech— we come into this country wordless to find everything already named and so contained by its appellation— once the red and … Continue reading Brimming Over by George Singer→
What’s that? I ask pointing at the x-ray. Oh, that’s your heart. Or a tumor. I should check with the radiologist. Don’t bother. It’s both. My heart is black. Blacker than any organ medical history records. Or so I was told as a teenager by a friend of a friend who was sick of watching me hurt her friend. I had every excuse in the book: I loved her too much, I loved someone else, I wasn’t in love enough. In the end, I hurt everyone involved and failed to learn a thing. And now … Continue reading Diagnosis by Andrew Gent→
Allow me to be a reflection of all of her tastes, including that core piece of her that makes fun of me for not screaming the lyrics of a song about John Deere green. How could I truly love her without owning one pair of Wrangler jeans? It is because I love her I still drive the forty minutes to sit at a field party near a retention pond, where one of her friends, a lawyer now, shoots fireworks over a two-lane highway with multiple decorated crosses for teenagers that couldn’t find the middle lane. … Continue reading Emily as She Spends Three Consecutive Days in Licking County by Darren C. Demaree→
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→
Nothing changes after the year we spend our Sunday mornings offering tea to the homeless in the shadow of the Mission, you know, fashion philanthropy. No paradise, no floats in the parade, no graphs moving up or down. We still wake up to the same mornings, our hungry souls staring at their hungry souls staring at our breakfasts through the television set. The last time I looked the world doesn’t operate according to serving tea on Sundays. It just keeps turning and spitting out more sadness, and we stick around for those few occasions when … Continue reading I tell my wife we are all drawn to sadness by Casey Killingsworth→
The last thing I drank was clear. The number of times I’ve had to repeat this reproduces, every anesthesiologist preparing for vomit, I guess. My apologies — I did not mean to spit that out, start your day with such a gross sort of showering, you alongside me, half naked on a frigid table, foaming like a geyser’s mouth. I meant to say something more profound, poetic, give you a peaceful tributary of words, a transparent shallow that, if you sit still in it long enough, you hardly feel anything but weightless. Yet everything known … Continue reading Prep work by Katherine Gotthardt→
how do i fit a city into a suitcase and how do i fit the feeling of waking with the sunrise or not sleeping until the stars blur how do i fit the scent of a rose peeking through cracks of concrete, fragrant plumeria blossoms lining streets, the comfort of seeing rows of olive trees little dots on a hill, or being surrounded by mountains wiser and older than all who inhabit their foothills how do i fit a city into a suitcase? the quiet nods as greetings of friendly hello when spoken languages don’t … Continue reading fitting places into a suitcase by Hibbah Haddam→
Last night the dreams poured in through the window. The plants, brought in for the first threat of freeze, let them rest and take stock on their last leaves. The dreams— knowing so much— didn’t know where to enter when I taped my mouth shut. And then they just became me, and I became the window, which amounted to nothing but seeing. I woke up in the back of my head and my understanding of the size of the sky turned purple, pink, and apricot. I think my place on this earth is in my … Continue reading Knowing and Oh My, 2 poems by Julia Falcinelli→
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