They’re up on the branch tips, all eight legs en pointe— one hundred and four chitinous arachnids, their tutus matching leafless twigs. These spiders parse every gust, like surfers scoping wind and swell; desirous wind, wind strong and constant, like the hot custard disc of June. When it blows faithful, they hoist their buttocks, as if spiders actually had buttocks, shooting life-lines of silk into wind—wind, now a sculptor’s hands, patting and twirling the silklines into a sail, or is it a parachute; aeronauts lifting into the air as if west was the only … Continue reading When the Spring Winds are Strong, Wolf Spiders Balloon by Gary Grossman→
This year my credit card company sent me a birthday card. In simple red, white and blue it wished me a happy birthday from Credit One. It is nice of my credit card to put the effort in to send a physical card when an email would have done it. My mom sent a text. My credit card puts the work in. It knows how to rupture and repair. It gives double miles at thousands of convenient locations all over the world. My credit card is senpai Uwu. I’ll never have to ask for it … Continue reading Maxed Out by Jason Montgomery→
My eyes, full of my husband’s body thinning, swelling, sleeping— too full to notice the plant, six feet tall, emerald leaves splitting, fraying the air. One, then another branch breaks, piercing my myopia. I weigh a faux substitute I can’t kill. Then think of my man, how this is his Costa Rica across from his TV and chair. Double down—spend a few hundred dollars, buy a pot large enough to hug, two fat bags of soil. Hire two strong men to tip the plant, coax it from its stranglehold into the large container without crushing. … Continue reading The Investment by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried→
Why does she get all the praise just because she pushed the witch into blood-burning flames it was me who gathered shiny white pebbles glistening like promises under a gibbous moon it was me who scattered breadcrumbs not my fault they were eaten by a murder of crows, slick and black it was me who the witch was fattening waiting like a flesh-eating ogress with taloned fingers and frenzied hair it was clever me who offered her the scrawny bone instead of my fleshy finger it was me, clever me, who whispered to Gretel tell … Continue reading Hansel by Claire Rubin Scott→
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→
Plop A Rorschach inkblot appears on the cement before me. I veer to avoid the disgusting mess. Weirdly white for a germ filled poop, I fail to find any meaning or truth in its shape. ………….Plop Another shape appears before me. Soon I will have trouble making it across the parking lot without soiling my shoes and smearing whatever truth the shape reveals. ………………..Plop Holy shit. This is no longer a test of my psychological health but a challenge to my agility and endurance. Can I see my future in this new shape? ………………………Plop The … Continue reading Plop by Mary Walsh→
for Alfred Kern,1924-2009 Search Amazon for his novel, The Width of Waters, and you get No Image Available and No Customer Reviews. Instead, you see suggestions for dry texts on hydro resource management. Yet, as if the red ink is still wet between the lines of my fictions typewritered onto now yellowing pages, his words manifest in my mind’s margins. I wonder if the storyisn’t or can’t be deeper.Press harder. Once, as a curious student, I visited his classic Victorian facing Diamond Park, watched as he released, … Continue reading Mentor by Jeanne Julian→
An 800-year-old cathedral is burning to the ground. The world is in horror that things, too, can die, though we thought them immune or immortal. We thought beauty could save, or fondness, or all the photos we took and took. But the spire is collapsing, and the roof. A black skeleton against the metal-bright flames. Nothing can save you or any other thing. The mitochondria in my cells are burning their last. Powerhouse trinkets from my mother and the mothers before her. I’m the end of them. Even if I’d had children, it would have … Continue reading For Notre Dame by Sian M. Jones→
Before the Ambulance I saw him collapse on the trail that divides the golf course, then climbs and looks over the valley crowded with townhouses for fifty-five and older. If we entered the fallen man’s home we could see the forever stamps in folded sheaths of waxed paper neatly tucked beside reading glasses, an hourglass, and gadgets that calculate distance and day. We’d see the unused weekly planners and the used that annotated the meetings with doctors and accountants and one for a lawyer that was crossed out. As the siren from down the hill … Continue reading Before the Ambulance and Dandelion, 2 poems by Dennis Cummings→
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