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→
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→
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→
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→
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→
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