Autumn is officially over, leaves finally cleared, trees naked, winter sky a show of planets that begins early with Venus glazing the western sky. It’s time to dwell briefly at the door between the old year and new one, beginning with the month (January) named after the Roman god Janus. In mythology, Janus is depicted with two faces, one looking forward into the future, the other looking back into the past. Often shown holding a key, he is the protector of thresholds, gates, and openings. I spend New Year’s Day flipping back through my calendar, … Continue reading New Year by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
Stealing Japanese poetry requires great skill, almost Ninja-like stealth, especially at night when there are so many poets out viewing the moon and, in Winter, the snow. But it’s best not to do it then because your tracks can easily be traced back to the scene of the crime. In Spring there’s not enough leaves to hide behind. But if you wait until Summer, when trees are fat and thick with green, then it will be hard to see the moon when it first rises. And always be careful in Autumn— the haunting sound of … Continue reading Stealing Japanese Poetry by Robert Harlow→
It rained the day before so burying the cat wasn’t as hard as she thought it would be. She found a shovel in the shed, and wrapped her pet in an old towel and a grocery bag and put it in the hole like that, not wanting to see the life gone from his eyes. She shoveled the dirt back, then walked in the woods that bordered their two acres until she found a sufficient rock to keep animals from digging him up. She had met the truck for the delivery of the beds and … Continue reading The New House by Dawn Abeita→
If I do a search for poems with the word light in the title, I get 12,600 hits. For dark, I get 6,000. This doesn’t scratch the surface of how many times “light” appears buried within stanzas. Can it be that we poets, blackly contemplative as we’re perceived, are at least twice as obsessed with light as darkness? After the leaves fall and days shorten, we begin to make our own light. Red and green and blue twinkle up and down my road, colored stars sprinkle rooftops of barns. We offer this glow to the … Continue reading Mehr Licht by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
Rebecca Watkins has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself changed in his bed to some monstrous kind of vermin.” —The Metamorphosis *** It was winter, 2021 when my first Nespresso machine, Helga, died. I am not the kind of person who names my personal belongings, but I figure it would be more enjoyable to read “The Story of Helga” instead of “The Story of the Nespresso Machine,” so I am calling her Helga. I had noticed, once or … Continue reading Cockroaches in Coffee Pots by Rebecca Watkins→
Teaching, too, is labor. Everyday to be up to the task, everyday the master of a hundred worlds, of casual words, and of causal words, to confront the faces added to or taken from. Do you know when you add a thought there, it shows in the eyes, it shows in the mouth’s subtle creases? Do you know, when you stop a thought, when you turn it aside with a straight line, with the shortest distance from there to here, it shows in the brow’s labor? Exhaustion. Do you know that teaching is exhaustion, everyday … Continue reading Teaching by J.R. Solonche→
Through a dimly lit haze, I see myself in my adult son’s psych ward room, gathering his things into a paper bag so we can check out. I place his clothes, extra pair of shoes, personal items into a grocery sack because the beautiful twilight iridescent duffle bag (mine) that they arrived in seven days prior has now gone missing according to the nursing staff. On the flat wooden rail atop the half wall separating the wash sink from his sleeping area is a tiled, rectangular trivet sort of thing. “Nick,” I say, “is this … Continue reading The Trivet by Nancy Halgren→
SUCHNESS Unable to find a bait station, the termite guy says Call me when you’ve trimmed all this. I say It’s supposed to be this way, a cottage garden of its own making and movement, a profusion that sees beyond any preordained order. He sees only thorns, a cloud of white climbers disappearing the stone path. So much suchness is good for the soul. Lord, I’ve tried to tame it, but let me not try to suppose where or what it should be but its own labial pink, its own gallop across borders and walls. … Continue reading SUCHNESS and DITCH LILIES, 2 poems by Linda Parsons→
Immigration Service Camp, Kenedy, Texas – May 1944 Nearly two years had passed since a Peruvian policeman pointed a pistol at him and declared Tadashi Yamada to be “under arrest.” The employee of a Japanese food store in Lima, Tadashi, along with hundreds of other Japanese and Japanese-Peruvians, soon found himself shipped off to internment in Camp Kenedy, Texas. Seizing these people through a deal with Peruvian authorities, the United States government hoped to use them as bargaining chips in exchange for Americans held by the Japanese. But that did not happen. Twenty-four and a … Continue reading New Cut Hay by Lawrence F. Farrar→
“It is true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.” —George Orwell “Why I Write” (1947) Several months ago (23 September 2024) Miles Fowler wrote a Street Talk blog titled “The Thinly Disguised Autobiography” which provoked me to reflect on this “courageous or foolhardy” activity. Naturally, many writers entertain the notion of writing about themselves; personal experience being a writer’s primary resource. Autobiography differs from biography in that the author is still alive! I say this flippantly as biography can be of a person alive … Continue reading A Bragging Humility by Fred Wilbur→
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