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→
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→
This moment demands my attention. Tiny turtles, vulnerable as polar bears, bubble up from their sandy womb, struggle towards light borrowed from the moon, dropped onto the sea. I spend so much time surrounded by concrete, cars, and catastrophe that birth in the wild startles, like the moment fine wine trips over the tongue and without instruction, awakens the palette. Human tragedy tramples parts of the world I can’t find on a map and places I can drive to—just down the road where home-grown shooters kill en masse, shielded by the 2nd Amendment. Just look … Continue reading One Moment Along the Food Chain by Marsha Owens→
When you add cream to your coffee there is a moment of storm beneath the surface, the possibility of a sinner planting a kiss on the gates of heaven, a string of cloud floating in the old well before the clanging and swirling spoon drains all of our hopes into the great brown ditch. And yet this kind of hope can only live in a moment. The young communist’s dream before Stalin’s moustache crawls into his trousers, mercilessly scratching his thighs; the trust of the promising acolyte before the moat-like grimace of a priest separates … Continue reading Cafe con Leche by Benjamin Schmitt→
My eyes, full of my husband’s body thinning, swelling, sleeping— too full to notice the plant, six feet tall, emerald leaves splitting, fraying the air. One, then another branch breaks, piercing my myopia. I weigh a faux substitute I can’t kill. Then think of my man, how this is his Costa Rica across from his TV and chair. Double down—spend a few hundred dollars, buy a pot large enough to hug, two fat bags of soil. Hire two strong men to tip the plant, coax it from its stranglehold into the large container without crushing. … Continue reading The Investment by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried→
Why does she get all the praise just because she pushed the witch into blood-burning flames it was me who gathered shiny white pebbles glistening like promises under a gibbous moon it was me who scattered breadcrumbs not my fault they were eaten by a murder of crows, slick and black it was me who the witch was fattening waiting like a flesh-eating ogress with taloned fingers and frenzied hair it was clever me who offered her the scrawny bone instead of my fleshy finger it was me, clever me, who whispered to Gretel tell … Continue reading Hansel by Claire Rubin Scott→
Deborrah Corr has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest The red onion is a purple globe. I hold it, let my skin adore its slick, smooth contours. Then I bear down with a knife. A slice reveals a maze. No, I’ve misspoken. I’m mistaken. There are no passages with doorways through which you wander, puzzled how to get to the center and find your way back again. Just white corridors, inescapable layers, lined in lilac. Rotating, arriving always where you started. I begin to think monotony. I think hospital hallways, blank anxiety. … Continue reading The red onion by Deborrah Corr→
An 800-year-old cathedral is burning to the ground. The world is in horror that things, too, can die, though we thought them immune or immortal. We thought beauty could save, or fondness, or all the photos we took and took. But the spire is collapsing, and the roof. A black skeleton against the metal-bright flames. Nothing can save you or any other thing. The mitochondria in my cells are burning their last. Powerhouse trinkets from my mother and the mothers before her. I’m the end of them. Even if I’d had children, it would have … Continue reading For Notre Dame by Sian M. Jones→
Before the Ambulance I saw him collapse on the trail that divides the golf course, then climbs and looks over the valley crowded with townhouses for fifty-five and older. If we entered the fallen man’s home we could see the forever stamps in folded sheaths of waxed paper neatly tucked beside reading glasses, an hourglass, and gadgets that calculate distance and day. We’d see the unused weekly planners and the used that annotated the meetings with doctors and accountants and one for a lawyer that was crossed out. As the siren from down the hill … Continue reading Before the Ambulance and Dandelion, 2 poems by Dennis Cummings→
This is the light of stillness after everything has been said and thought, after the day has been brought to its knees once more, after the excuses, the bargainings with self, conversations that started so hopefully, but stopped. Don’t expect the darkened maple to turn over a bright leaf, find its own breeze. What pours in through the blinds is unmoved as the numb paw of your hand half opened or closed on the snow bank pillow, cold as the truth of its sleep. Let that radiance lift me weightless, timeless, into its night, and … Continue reading Moonlight by Ronald Stottlemyer→
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