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→
We walked down this dusty canyon, where the rains have worn gashes in the gray banks like the creases that run from your cheek bones to your jaw line, Dad. Once you rowed us on a lake, squinting in reflected light, the muscles of your chest and arms fluid, your laughter again like cold water in my face. Then, only a boy, I wanted arms like yours. I even wanted a crease in my cheek. But when I leaned towards you, you shouted, “Sit down! What are you trying to do?” and I sat hunched … Continue reading Trails by Will Hemmer→
Olivia Lee Stogner is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest Where Horses Grow Tired of Running, Hadeel’s Story Today I went to fill up drinking water. My children are doing well.here. They are children who do not know what is going on around them.Dalia is only one month old. I walked a kilometer to reach the water place. It is not your fault. We are believers. We cannot change reality. This is beyond our capabilities.W We cannot say no to America, Europe, or Israel. There are superpowers and we have been oppressed– … Continue reading The Land Where Horses Grow Tired of Running, Hadeel’s Story by Olivia Lee Stogner→
The night was so quiet I could almost hear the stars, that place laden with pines. Your eyes hard to read across the air between us, air you swallowed whole with I’m sorry, I need more room. But I believe in gestures, in the plate of mandarinas served at dawn, when you knew I needed feeding. Linda Laino is a visual artist and writer who has been making art in one form or another for over forty-five years.She received two years of fellowship awards from the Virginia Museum in pursuit of an MFA from Virginia … Continue reading Mandarinas by Linda Laino→
I have discarded the gods like leftover tuna sandwiches stacks of them stuffed in the recycling including Odin, Shiva, Baal, Sango and Amaterasu bitter ends of unanswered prayers to pastel angels, scraps of saints and multi-armed goddesses all bling and blang no way to bargain with refractory gods no way to seduce them with hymns and chants dharanis and tallits and offerings of ghee hours spent on arthritic knees under overrated stars muttering useless nostrums my list of needs multiplying like dandelions in my lamentable lawn my granddaughter dances past her sequined skirt all rinsed … Continue reading Where to Begin Again by Claire Scott→
I have a fondness for our imperfect union that started with a swindle – too much money for land and a set of plans that had hung over the place like a wrecking ball. I pieced together a story of miners and Mi-Wuks all faded from a view marked now by boarded stamp mills and raised wooden walkways in the shadow of the hillside cemetery. There were no treasures to be found – no spotted bats, burrowing owls, western myotis, Pacific fisher, Foothill yellow-legged frog, or even San Joaquin fox. No Mi-Wuk shards, no watershed … Continue reading Goodbye to Love Atop Old Priest Grade by Mary Pacifico Curtis→
Before she invented the ladder to the sky, she first invented the sky to have somewhere to go. Then she pulled the ladder up after her. But she was kind enough to leave a few clues behind— here and there— about how to build a ladder but without using wood, or nails, or hammers to pound them in. Robert Harlow resides in upstate N.Y. He is the author of Places Near and Far (Louisiana Literature, 2018). His poems appear in Poetry Northwest, RHINO Poetry, Cottonwood, The Midwest Quarterly, and in other journals. He is a … Continue reading The Emily Dickinson Revery Construction Guide by Robert Harlow→
Did the G-d of the South finally begin perspiring and give that little knob a flick, mid-September or if lucky, August 22nd? Now the wind is an aloe blanket, remedy for a stove-burned arm—a refrigerator door held open for three cooling minutes; humidity an afterimage on my retina of summer. And sunlight glows like maple icing on a cake baked daily. Autumn resurrects every annual cycle, but peeling off the dried glue of August, I comprehend that redemption and renewal are all books to be read again and again. Gary Grossman’s work appears in forty-four … Continue reading Flipping the Switch in Georgia by Gary D. Grossman→
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