Derek Kannemeyer has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest My father planted this fig tree. 25 years ago, the last time my folks visited. The flight back got too much for them-—missed connections, no sleep, lost luggage. And I put in a sapling plum, with dad’s help, but that one’s died since. I thought the fig was dying too, but on the phone, my dad just laughed. The day that fig tree dies is the day that I die. We scattered the ash of him five years ago, but his fig tree … Continue reading Ray’s Fig Trees by Derek Kannemeyer→
I will never forget the first time I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and its startling portrait of the character Pilate. When Milkman first meets her she is standing very still, dressed in black and cradling a round, luminous orange in her palm. That image never left me, suffused as it was, with archetypes of The Crone, The Magician, The Shadow. Morrison knew how to make heart-stopping use of instinctual images. Plumbing deeper, I think the portrait of Pilate personified the Earth Mother, her darkness and her light, her life-giving power and her predation. … Continue reading Spring’s Memory by Sharon Ackerman→
Wendy Jean MacLean is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest Fenced in by the property owner the beehive hut of an Irish monk still stands as it has for fourteen centuries. Three euros will get you in through the gate with the added bonus a pen of baby lambs you can fondle for photos. (Behold! The lamb of God!) Inside the hut the owner has stored his gas tank and his electric sander. (Behold! Sins worn down on demand!) The sharp cliffs and fierce waves have not changed over the centuries. … Continue reading Beehive Hut Near Dingle by Wendy Jean MacLean→
Mary, Mary, quite contrary . . . a splat from my Charlottesville restauranting days . . . From the mid-1970s until the early 1980s, I co-owned a couple of Charlottesville restaurants with my second ex-husband. I was an accidental restauranteur. Second-ex had dropped out of law school one course short of a degree because he couldn’t bear the idea of being a lawyer. He had no idea what to do next and was understandably depressed. He knew the business side of restaurants from working in them during college and law school. I loved to cook. … Continue reading Second Acts By Martha Woodroof→
They knew exactly when it would happen. Not just the day and the hour, but the minute. The very second. Even before they knew it, it was still destined to happen at that precise moment because it had been—quite literally—written in the stars. Like god had wound up a big clock a million years ago and all people needed was to learn to tell time . . . Mrs. Robbenault talked like this because she was excited. The whole town was excited. There were t-shirts for sale and signs in the store windows. Every morning … Continue reading Totality by Rigel Oliveri→
Rebecca leaned into the driver’s-side window while I let the engine idle. Her brown hair had lengthened over the summer, and some strands fluttered into the car. The constellations in the ink-black sky and two lampposts illuminated the gravel parking lot. Hugging me, she said in a voice raspy with fatigue, “Thanks for coming with me, Dad.” I waited while she crossed the lot—the pebbles crunching underfoot interrupting the rhythm of the frogs and insects on this rural New Hampshire night. As she approached the road to return to the summer camp where she worked, … Continue reading Eighteen Years and Seven Months by E. H. Jacobs→
Charlotte Rea is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest So proud you must be, atop the fence rail, its flat black the perfect matte for your copper. Your telltale yellow tail-tip aglow under the vines,I’ve come to clip gloveless, blind to your sinuous stretch just a strike from my fingertips. Who is frightened more by our fateful brush with peril? You given no chance to respond as the shovel severs your tender neck–death quick as your tiny hourglasses bleed out time. Your climb is all hope you remember, synched dance of scale … Continue reading Elegy for a Young Copperhead by Charlotte Rea→
When insomnia provokes my wife or I to walk the footprint of our house, we sometimes end up at our bookroom. Bookroom is an idiosyncratic idiom of our family as my grandparents used the term, logically enough, for their room filled with books. When I was a kid it was the quiet room (Shssssh) with glass-doored cases, walls of tooled leather, slag glass lamps, and ‘oriental’ rugs. Our bookroom is not so different, though let’s substitute open shelves that, aggravatingly, are un-adjustable, walls of pine paneling, bright LED lights with inexpensive shades, and bare board … Continue reading Library Skulls by Fred Wilbur→
My attention often falls on things that just happen to be right where they are, set down here or there, together with this or that, thoughtlessly, as we say. These are gatherings of things I happen to have, that have caught my eye and been brought home, that friends and family have given me because they knew I would like them. They smile in anticipation of my delight. All of this is still life, occasions between plans, purposes, habits, and obligations, objects out of use, in the spaces between the times of our … Continue reading Nothing but Light: Works by David Summers→
Susan Muse is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest Peas are on. The kitchen smells of fatback and cornbread rising in a rush of heat from the stove, unfurling around me like those green stalks in the south field bent over with a want for picking. Earlier I sat in the swing on the shaded porch popping a mess of purple hull peas into a colander, abandoning the shells haphazardly in a ripped-open bag spread brown on my lap. Each one, its freedom echoing against the metal sides of the blue speckled … Continue reading Renegade by Susan Muse→
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