Hey, son. It’s your Mama. Hope y’all are doing good up there. I’m callin’ cause I’ve got a little problem here. So, did you hear about that storm we had a couple days ago, that derecho? Well, none of us had ever heard of one before, either. It was a perfectly nice day and then the wind starts a blowin’ and sounding like a big ‘ole freight train. The trees in the front yard were all bent over double. I’m telling you, it was like the end of days—I never heard such a noise … Continue reading Cats by Christine Tucker→
Zeina Azzam has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest Forgive Me For lying to the teacher in the school yard Talking ill of my friend behind her back For making an excuse to leave early while visiting my mother in her sick bed For walking away from a lover without explanation, running from remorse I have felt guilty about slapping my small son’s hand so many years ago About acting impatient, bitter, callous, spiteful, unfriendly, or mean with those I love and those I don’t. These thoughts return often like mosquitoes in … Continue reading Forgive Me by Zeina Azzam→
The Moroccan village was the same color as the surrounding hills and empty desert. The landscape had three primary colors: sandy tan, sky blue, and, occasionally, palm tree green. The young couple, tourists traveling into the hinterlands, found menu choices equally limited where options, like all resources, were scarce. The couple carried their argument from the restaurant into the night. The man, angry, pulled the woman close, roughly gripping her sweater. “Take care what you say.” From the shadows down the dusty narrow side street emerged a small group of young men, boys really. The … Continue reading The Camel’s Hump by Albert McFarland→
Victoria Korth has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest Mr. Abraham You would unstick huge floor-to-ceiling windows with a metal-clawed broom handle, soak the floor where someone vomited, clear sleeted walks while we waited in line, quiet the boiler, keep water flowing in fountains, walk around the school’s perimeter in faded green pants, head down, and into the basement while in the classroom, at the window or in the hall I watched you. Although I have lived the question of how one person knows the other and accepted that we did not, … Continue reading Mr. Abraham by Victoria Korth→
William Prindle has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest Apologizing to Ferlinghetti You never took the deal the hand America dealt what did you have to lose anyway father and mother dead or gone mad you spoke French first so why not bat the English words way out there fungoes of the mind screw the form screw the State just write and how you wrote wrote and sold sold like hell turned on the Lights published Howl screwed the Court didn’t thank the Academy that did … Continue reading Apologizing to Ferlinghetti by William Prindle→
Luisa M. Giulianetti is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest The Pepper Jar ………………….……….for Dad Guided by the moon, you germinate seeds. Transplanting infant plants well after the final frost. Fostering them. Withhold water before the harvest to deepen their flavor, reaping a basket of red fruit adorned with green hats. Summer ’09: your last labor of horticultural love. You lay the nightshades to dry under the August sun, discarding the soft bodies. Tending never ends with the harvest. Two weeks later, their plump, glossy skin withered as a crone’s. Drying, you … Continue reading The Pepper Jar by Luisa M. Giulianetti→
When Stevie Nicks was a witch in Florida, I sent her letters on stationery purchased from the canteen. The new girl at the youth residential center told me her mother was Stevie Nicks, and also a witch. I was fourteen, a year into the system. I didn’t ask why Stevie Nicks’s daughter was also there. Anything was possible; lies about mothers, or the real reasons kids were there: I’d been stealing cars since I was eleven, or my teachers kept calling the social workers, or, my mom’s in jail for selling drugs. I heard the … Continue reading When Stevie Nicks Was a Witch in Florida by T. J. Butler→
Victoria Korth is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest Treatment Team Found lying in a parking lot on Union Street, close to the shelter where she’d been in flight from a husband who sex-trafficked on and off: a delusion she was prone to, one resistant to meds. Found splayed across chalk lines, knitted cap knocked off, balding head’s few strands splotched tar—she had breast cancer in addition to bipolar, you see was childlike off her meds, lost to our expertise. That’s the way it is, an ember melting us together, annealing, it … Continue reading Treatment Team by Victoria Korth→
In the small Appalachian town where I was born lived a squat, bowlegged, hairless doctor. Some called him a quack and a dope fiend, but in 1954 he delivered me on his dining room table, spanked me ‘til I cried, and thirteen years later laid his cigar in an ashtray as his flabby fingers probed my pubescent neck while he peered through Coke Bottle lenses down my throat, past my recalcitrant tongue, exploring the mystery of vocal cords that refused to function. I cringed at his questions, so on point that I wept, as one … Continue reading Speechless by Peggy Schimmelman→
Gina Malone is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest Why My Father Cannot Lay a Stone Wall Nearly eighty now he drags out the soft middles of words when he plunders his past, sweeping disparate bits into piles his voice steps around. I always wanted to learn how to build stone walls, he says. ……………………………………………Eyes elsewhere he tells of a man ……………………………………………he knew when he was young, ……………………………………………an old man who said he would ……………………………………………teach him how to build a wall, to lay stone level upon stones in layers of orderly precision. … Continue reading Why My Father Cannot Lay a Stone Wall by Gina Malone→
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