I Bought Them I bought them, two big books, fat with two lifetimes of poems, not so much to read them, which, over a long time, as is meant, I will do, but just to look at, their bigness, heavy as loaves of grainy peasant bread, and their pictures on the covers, the two old Polish poets, Milosz and Herbert, their beautiful white hair, their beautiful long white fingers, their beautiful white cigarettes, and the smoke like their own beautiful white ghosts. J.R. Solonche is author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long … Continue reading I Bought Them by J.R. Solonche→
Mom Wants to Talk Football On the gridiron of family life, she and I stood the sidelines, flanking the husband and father who, fourth and goal in the waning minutes, always called his own number. She, the former German schoolgirl who had fled here in ’36 with her hick-town kin, to major later in garter belts and Maybelline, and who would not at any time have known a pigskin from an eggplant. Though now that the masterful man is gone, and she has her new bed, having slept a single night on his side of … Continue reading Mom Wants to Talk Football; Speaking in Tongues by Ken Haas→
How to Grow Wild Vision failing, she feels the leaves looking for butterfly weed, a seedling from her greenhouse for me to take, add to my efforts to flower a field. Cup plant, sweet goldenrod. Stratify the seeds six weeks then scratch them in—instructions on the packets she presses in my hands, stressing the importance of natives. On this street of manicured lawns, her home, its yard not mown, could be mistaken for abandoned. Fleabane, milkweed. But no monarchs this summer so far—a hint of loss that worries her. “Invasive,” she says about the … Continue reading How to Grow Wild by Kathy Davis→
The Jumping Off Place Josephine Hopper’s comment on husband Edward’s painting, Rooms by the Sea, 1951 Azure waves float two rooms a door opens catching the ocean breeze sunlight streams in a part of this suite where under a slice of picture the red sofa invites shadowed in blue-gray the corner of a chest no balcony no steps no sand the jumping off place for someone who gazes from these disembodied rooms waiting for the horizon to widen the sea to deepen who would want to be drifting here only a seeker of the spare ways a … Continue reading The Jumping Off Place by Diana Pinckney→
My Grandfather’s Garage, 1966 Steel licenses, galvanized, nailed to the wall, black Virginia plates, rusted and dented, years spanning a life on this farm, his World War, to the second, his sons’, our fathers’. Children, we kneel before sagging cardboard on the oil-soaked dirt, reeking still of machines. Brittle pages crumbling as we rifle Field & Stream, National Wildlife. Silverfish scuttle. Dust rises in dimness. We peer into a fading Popular Science over and over, breathless and startled cousins whispering, sunburned noses turning up and freckled like our fair-haired fathers’. Rapt, as if I … Continue reading My Grandfather’s Garage, 1966; Heart Box by Lynda Fleet Perry→
Promontory At the overlook, we could see four states If the fog had not rested its elephantine Rump upon the conifers. We can barely See each other, much less the road Switchbacking down the side of something Extraordinary, that we’d hoped to Experience, in full sun, even though We rose in and out of sudden Precipitation. The entrails of an owl Would predict a dirty soup Like purgatory where hopes are grey Bandages flapping loose over the red wound. A shaman burns the diary. This journey Must be undertaken. The valleys spread tables For … Continue reading Promontory by Joan Colby→
3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Poetry Contest Patina The things you forget are the stupid verbal confetti of old love letters, the weight of ancient matters settling the scales of justice around your shoulders like a yoke or a shawl, and it doesn’t matter, because you’re wearing it, for work or for warmth you don’t know. They’ve come to rest there, ploughshares or bodyrags of old words, leaving splinters or growing tattered—it doesn’t much matter. All tales grow old in the telling of them but still are yours, mine, ours, the dazzling, crumbling … Continue reading Patina by Pamela Sumners→
Jennifer Sutherland is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Poetry Contest An Elegant Variation One quiet Sunday we drove south on silver-leafed Charles Street, ducked into one of the gingerbread warrens between the university lawns and wondered at the late day’s water-light reflected in the leaded panes, the four-centered arches, the oriels, the pitched slate, and we watched the nannies in their strolling from chimney to chiminea as autumn wound itself toward sleep. As the bricks slid by I catalogued the ghosts of all the lives we might have made but for, and … Continue reading An Elegant Variation by Jennifer Sutherland→
2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Poetry Contest mi gemela i can hear avocado trees in the backyard, the hum of abuela’s sewing machine in the kitchen. the plastic chairs poke the fat of our thighs as we watch telemundo and eat arepas- hours escape us. night ripens and we lie in bed as the street lamps rest on our sabana. both of us not saying: i’m waiting for dad too. Alexandra Mendoza Routt is a native of Miami, Florida who’s taken on the big city to receive her MFA in creative writing at The … Continue reading mi gemela by Alexandra Mendoza→
Ferment Orchard in February. Branches, matted as hair, litter the rows after pruning. Soil, strewn with old fruitfall, soaks in last season’s rancid sun seeped from these gnawed globes: Ambrosias, Auroras, Pink Ladies, now rusted and fleshless. Their skins peel back like those of fallen tomatoes in August, left to blister and stink. Small black birds sit motionless against blank and separate sky, below which, earth in hibernatory ferment concocts from sweetest Melus this bitter brandy for weathering out. One wavers a bit in its frieze. Even for them, a little ivresse eases the … Continue reading Ferment by Lucy Alford→
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