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→
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→
There is a hand dangling from the driver’s window of the car ahead, a sight seen less often on hot days like this, when most folks crank up the A/C and keep hands inside, but this one seems unbothered by the heat. It bounces and pulses, sometimes points fingers or twists the wrists, does a judo chop or makes a fist. I can’t hear the band it dances to, but try to imagine the music from the motion I see, something jazzy, jumpy, full of jive, nothing limp or frumpy about this music or this … Continue reading Hand Dancing in a 45 Speed Zone by Richard Allen Taylor→
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→
The buffalo are gone And those who saw the Buffalo are gone~ Carl Sandburg I. The sun rose and spread her long fingers of light onto the grasses and great plains of Custer State Park. Over twenty-thousand tourists are herded to parking areas where we line up on both shoulders of the valley to witness twelve-hundred buffalo race through the grasslands, kick up muck, feel their weight pound the earth beneath us. II. When the buffalo come down through the valley, they shuffle like cows going to slaughter. We are told it is too warm … Continue reading At the Buffalo Roundup by Kristin Laurel→
into earth muffled dark with fear that i hold in risen shoulders, sacral plate, pelvis, vertebrae. my earth heart sends a radio signal, a star wink, dragon fly’s glance & wing clicks resonate through my body mass – doubts, societal expectations such as a body can only be whole if white or a vanilla mind must coordinate with skin like matching gloves, hats, shoes & purse ‘50’s style my vertebral discs are collapsing, degenerates, generations crushed from carrying false beliefs squeezed out, cut from the herd, don’t fit transcriptions, images iconically worshiped politicized dirt digging … Continue reading tunneling with my friend mole by Susanne S. Rancourt→
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→
My father dulled his surmise. He rang the register, count ‘em Greenback and copper upon the eye. Blue black fell on Harlem. He poured the day into olive canvas bag Pocketed the gun, flicked alarm switch Left the shop, turned key to drag His gloom, eyes hooded, pitch. He drove 125th Street to the bank Parked out front under the trestle. The bag chuted down night deposit, sank. He did it 30 years like a dog deaf to a whistle. Richard Oyama’s work has appeared in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American … Continue reading The Book of Nights by Richard Oyama→
We are pilgrims in the earth and strangers— we come from afar and we are going far. –Vincent van Gogh Abroad for some time now following our family’s wishes without much success or happiness. I sense their exasperation, their disappointment growing— soon there will be no tolerance left, even for an eldest son. I prefer not to speak of it except to you, brother. I hold up a mirror to the deep things which pass through me, sometimes flickering, sometimes blazing, always indomitable— feeling no connection to these plans for me. This I freely admit. … Continue reading Abroad by Brent Short→
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→
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