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 craters singing— but the sound didn’t travel. How tenuous is the tether to gravity in our story? Here lies his and hers— nostalgia in different sizes. On Earth, we searched for our traversing selves and the moon we landed on, chasing reflections of streetlight and headlight, and porch light. How did you steal that anti-gravity and put it in my pocket? You pushed me with such … Continue reading The Moon We Landed On by Marco Patitucci→
You are quirky in a very classy way. Postcards and trinkets and such. You make it all so interesting. Unathi to Anita Dear Debbie, Is your spirit smiling as I work on my third act? It’s been over ten years since the ovarian cancer took you away, and much longer since we brainstormed Mail Just for Me. Do you remember? It was before websites and social media and we were going to create a correspondence for kids. The plan was to learn about the girls and boys, individualize the notes that we sent. I loved … Continue reading Postcards and Authors by Anita Martin→
Morning hunkered over the house, gray and unyielding, pressing through the spaces between the drawn shade and the window frame. Wes sat on the edge of the bed in underwear and socks, next to a newly cleaned and pressed suit, still in dry-cleaner’s plastic. The only other furniture a three-drawer dresser and two nightstands of unfinished pine. His closet door stood half-open, exposing the dimly lit shelves and the t-shirts, sweaters and pants piled upon them. In searching for a belt, he had noticed a bright blue fold of fabric slumping over the shelf at … Continue reading Talisman by E.H. Jacobs→
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 impatient ambulance. Fears keep folding and holding me while cars wait for normal patterns to resume. Panic is the metaphysics of knowing anything may be normal en route to normalization. An unworded dream: discovering you, the man I love, in the lobby of frightened husbands who learn the lingo of cancer to buy time for their wives’ lives. The worst would be watching you lose … Continue reading Fear Has No Hospice by Alina Stefanescu→
In 1982, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I became what most movie-goers would call an extra, or what the movie business objectifies as “background.” I was in at least four movies, three of them big releases. A friend of mine, John-Michael, told me he was an extra on the The Right Stuff and said if I wanted to be one, too, I should go to Northern California Casting in San Francisco. There I was told to get a haircut, put on a conservative suit, and show up at the Cow Palace … Continue reading Background! by Miles Fowler→
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 he ever far from me did I do nothing when I knew I must have known the driver sunblind was it today or Tuesday or last week I called out did I I must have after all he is my son NOT REALLY A GAME, NOT REALLY DUCK DUCK DUCK DUCK chants Kathy running around … Continue reading And You, Do You Love Too? and Not Really a Game, Not Really, 2 poems by Claire Scott→
I never thought that by agreeing to teach a class in anthropological fieldwork I would soon be expected to be a spiritual healer. I should never have agreed to teach the class. I had never done fieldwork, so I had no experiences to draw on in teaching the class. Luckily an anthropologist colleague, Mike Kearney, invited me to join him in doing fieldwork in Baja California, Mexico. Our university was a four-hour drive from the community in Mexico where he was studying spiritual healers (espiritistas), so we could go there on weekends and between school … Continue reading Whatever is Important Will be Engraved in Your Brain by Paul Rosenblatt→
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 drums punch a groove, cymbals ride crash. Bones blare the blues as these Vikings of swing, in tux suits of noir, embellish and round the sound that winds down, then swells, slams to the ground. Julie is from St. Louis and moved to Titusville, Florida in 1964 because her father worked on the space program. She … Continue reading Big Jazz by Julie Wenglinski→
Artist Jane Skafte has designs on our natural environment. She illustrates her deep concerns for climate change with research, conscience and talent that subtly reveals devastation from the ground up. “I am interested in what happens when naturalism and the awesome terror of nature (e.g., tsunamis, erosion, earthquakes) is fused with abstract geometric elements, as a stand-in for human imposed structures and practices (e.g., clear cutting forests, fracking, CO2 emissions),” states Skafte on her website. “…In an attempt to deal with these overwhelming global events, I work to illustrate the changes that concern … Continue reading Jane Skafte: Cautions of Climate Change→
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