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. Some kind of scientist. I can’t believe I have ended up here: mediocrity. If my father would only rise from the dead. People think of me as intimidating and selfish. Maybe they don’t even think of me. Or they think of me as some kind of rotten fruit in the bottom of the fruit drawer, with a hint of mold and sweet … Continue reading Mental Health Status Exam: Incomplete Sentences by Stuart Gunter→
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 new clothes and carried it home. I walked into an empty apartment and immediately unpacked the jar and placed it on the counter. I tried to open it, but couldn’t. I turned the jar on the counter, every quarter-turn hitting the metal rim with the blade of a knife. I tapped the edge of the jar against the floor, … Continue reading Visiting My Father for the First Time in Five Years by Natalia Prusinska→
Writing my first novel was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It took me two full years to get through the first draft, and I felt like I was slogging my way through the entire time. I would write sections of the book and read over what I had written and cringe. Sure, I also had days where I felt like I had actually written something good, but most of the time I was full of self-doubt. I had never written a book before, so I had no idea what I was doing. I tried … Continue reading How to Fight the Self-Doubt that Comes with Writing Your First Book by Lauren Sapala→
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 dad’s back yard. Birds. Their legs curled yellow and twisted, contracture of unbecoming; their angry mother with her shiny eye tearing the nails from the roof to get back to the nest we had so carefully sealed. Beside the bodies, the debris of a home: gaping …….hole in the gutters; pale fluffs of matted insulation; a casket-less … Continue reading Mothers’ Day, 2016 by Joanna Lee→
It seemed to me to have been a long time since I devoted serious focus to my creative work—I mean in terms of organizing, keeping track, revising, submitting to journals, compiling a draft manuscript of newer work…the so-called business of poetry. I resolved therefore to spend a weekend at the task. Alas. The weekend revealed to me the extent of my benign neglect: ten years of not-really-being-on-the-ball. I do not consider myself a particularly prolific poet, but I found myself faced with well over a ream of poetry pages, many poems only in their second … Continue reading Neglecting the Work by Ann E. Michael→
In retrospect, I must have taken people by surprise, a seven-year-old standing alone on the corner of Cedar and State Street, passing out bumper stickers and campaign buttons for JFK. It was an act of irony and early independence, having been born into a solidly Republican family marred only by the fact that my mother had voted for FDR…and now me. Passing out understates my zeal; I was determined to get a button on every passing lapel, to undermine the integrity of gleaming chrome with that red white and blue strip featuring the name Kennedy … Continue reading JFK and Me by Mary Pacifico Curtis→
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→
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