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→
On the black and white TV, we watched silently, as an American soldier fell into a field of static like he was falling fast asleep, tumbling down the screen, out of sync with the signal, dropping one horizontal line at a time. Then, someone’s daughter came running out to us with her arms raised. They called her the Little Napalm Girl because she burned with Napalm’s invisible fire. She looked to be exactly my age at the time, caught on the camera in this first war, televised. My dad didn’t want me to see her, … Continue reading Little Napalm Girl by Jean Mikhail→
What Horses Say What’s to be made of the field of buttercups, a saffron sea at the bend of the road, with the three horses ….one black with white mane and tail …one coppered like a new penny ….one white as an angel a triumvirate of muscled peace and perfection. What’s to be made of thinking of 3 recently dead friends every single time I drive past the most laughably maudlin reach for meaning when the real story is simple: Time is real- the realest unseen thing undocumented, untouchable a mystery deeper than … Continue reading What Horses Say and Stains, 2 poems by Rita Quillen→
This is the light of stillness after everything has been said and thought, after the day has been brought to its knees once more, after the excuses, the bargainings with self, conversations that started so hopefully, but stopped. Don’t expect the darkened maple to turn over a bright leaf, find its own breeze. What pours in through the blinds is unmoved as the numb paw of your hand half opened or closed on the snow bank pillow, cold as the truth of its sleep. Let that radiance lift me weightless, timeless, into its night, and … Continue reading Moonlight by Ronald Stottlemyer→
In a dark subway tunnel between stations, a concave safety niche holds a grotto of graffiti unseen unless you happen to glance out when the train lights hit it. The moment you notice its radiance you’re past it, though if you close your eyes a vision of its brash vision remains. Someone braved the trains and third rail and cops to spray what graffiti artists call, considering the danger involved, a Heaven Spot. A Heaven Spot that tags you— in your own private grotto— like a dangerous dream. Mark Belair’s poems have appeared in numerous … Continue reading Heaven Spot by Mark Belair→
For your birth, metal instruments sing you and your fluorescent halo into being. At your baptism you are pressed by the hands of power into stale water against your will. This is your first day of school: sick with the bus’s diesel fumes, tripping on the toes of giants. For your wedding the family dynamite flies in. Their coat tails trail with thick fuses that you navigate in your blue shoes you keep your fire to yourself as hornets sleep in the palms of your roses. In midlife, your parents leave you in explosive fashion. … Continue reading Cursed by Tess Matukonis→
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