Stuart Gunter is a finalist of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Poetry Contest.
 

Finish these sentences to express your true feelings:
I always wanted to be intelligent, maybe a college
professor, or a poet. […]

Natalia Prusinska is a finalist of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Poetry Contest.
 

I took the jar of jam sealed with heat and wrapped it in old
towels. I placed it carefully in my suitcase among the […]

Joanna Lee is a finalist of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Poetry Contest.
 

We found two dead babies on the back granite slab
that serves as a stoop, the same
we salvaged from up home years ago, decaying
in […]

Marco Patitucci is a finalist of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Poetry Contest.
 

We measured small steps
as giant leaps
and never felt sameness,
nameless lunar imposters
dancing over the […]

Alina Stefanescu is a finalist of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Poetry Contest.
 

In my terror-hemmed flesh. The
wince against their raised voices of
desperate sirens, careful guarding
of pulse from […]

AND YOU, DO YOU LOVE TOO?
I said

I think I said

I must have said

don’t cross

did I know

should I have known

did I email, call, text

stay on the sidewalk

he was far away

was h […]

Brass soldiers line up
and pitch to his tune.
Piano man rules the room.
Hot, not sweet,
the band chases the beat.
Strings of guitars
slice the air into bars
and a velvety sax
swings for a splash
while […]

As I pass the willow-lined pond,
the wheels on my bike click over new cement cracks
from the toll of winter’s thaw.
How is it that not much has changed?
The arms of the same cedars droop over the same s […]

For Steve Gray, in Sarasota
The pine tops burn orange,
loud and strange: a train screaming on
burning tracks into the full moon.
The moon flutes sunlight to my upturned eyes:
I am as unable as the stars to […]

Lobster mitts might cushion the ache,
my hands numbed
by these cold, rain-wet stalks. The stakes
tenacious, anchored
in beds slimed here and there with rot.
Cut twine and a vine collapses,
limp as kelp. Tug […]

The Moth
It would be too simple
to describe its motives
as a flame off course,
a light mistaken for sun.
Loveliness is complicated,
a white body against darkness,
the night’s counterfeit
just beyond a s […]

A once resplendent roan
lying on its side, legs flailing,
as if it thought—
as if, in its final moment
it could think at all—
that it was still running,
wild and free.

So disdainful, so hig […]

Nightfall
There are stories
no one knows.
High summer.

The sound of tree frogs
coming
from all quarters.

 
Infra Dig
You know how when the sky
goes to hell in the west
there’s inevitably a black do […]

It’s hard to see him as a farmer, isn’t it?
Bending over the rows of lettuce and corn,
feeling the ears between his thumb and forefinger,

all the while remembering breadfruit and mango?
It’s hard to see h […]

When we lie side-by-side in an afterglow, he says,
I used to be a man of my word. Neither of us wants
to label his intentions, fearful of finding the meaning
in definition. Our fingers come together, […]

Gary Beaumier is the 1st place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Poetry Contest.
Night Train to Paris
Our aged bodies
surrender to the sway
and lurch of the train
as we have passed through
the long […]

National Poetry Month Daily Blog with Poem

Revising a draft, for me, means returning to the poem from several perspectives. I might change the speaker from first person to second or third person, or change the […]

It is the reach and sweep
of the horizon
that seduces the eye
the darker folds of clouds
the insinuation
of rose just above the water
a breeze moist and warm
like the touch of first love

a boat […]

Sunshine at last, & the woodland walks dappled with it.
On a patch-speckled side-path skirting a pond,
an immense tortoise, sunning itself.
Sshh, she said, as if they had been talking too loudly, or at all,
& […]

My Bride Face
Families from far apart met in Sengen Shrine.

I didn’t know the ritual;
reciting words, in heavy gold
kimono, geisha-face and geta.
I wore a wooden wig.

Later, in ivory and tiara, I sang k […]