Street Light Press

Street Light Press is looking for poetry that moves us. We don’t care for elaborate use of language–give us your real, your raw, and your intimate. The work that you write and hideaway because it feels too fragile to share with the rest of the world, that’s what we want.

35 By Phil Huffy

Revival

I walked the old street last night

finding your front steps

now claimed by other lovers

and saw them in shadow light

knowing that such times

are youthful, frantic moments

when the future is so distant

that reminiscence

is never even pondered.

Phil Huffy lives in Western New York and writes poems at his kitchen table. He has placed about 180 pieces in the last couple of years and has discovered that he is eminently googleable.

Deer Sausage

By Cameron Morse

I would like to throw my arms

around the creased red neck of the man

who paid my insurance premiums

through chemo and radiation,

but settle for a fraternal pat on the back.

On the road to Le Claire, transmission

towers drape their ledger lines over Iowa

with intervals of turtle doves. Bird nests

clot like blood in veiny branches.

On the road to pay our annual visit,

sleet shakes white pellets, seasoning

the cows that graze with their heads down

in the yellow chapel of the field.

Starry-eyed headlights streak the blacktop,

a blizzard of albino snakes blowing sideways.

After we arrive, Uncle Steve moseys out

in his sweatpants and army cap. I would like a hug

but settle for a slice of deer sausage,

the jalapeño & cheese-spliced

yield of his yearly hunt: four bucks, three does,

a miniature pogrom of dainty rodents

on his iPhone, black eyes glassed open.

Cameron Morse lives with his wife Lili and son Theodore in Blue Springs, Missouri. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Terminal Destination (Spartan Press, 2019).

March 15, 2020

Snowflake Projector

By Cameron Morse

An orange extension cord draped over the cold

shoulder of the lawn links the glittering

crystal eyeball of the projector

to the portico. All day it casts invisible snowflakes

over the gables and garage door.

In the wreckage of December—empty culm,

bird bath sucked to motheaten

leaves and shriveled berries, mailbox lid lolling

in tin metal silence—its light-emitting

diodes rotate in their cast iron socket, their black stake

driven among the oak leaves. Its unraveling

light is unseeable—wasted,

or waiting? After nightfall drags its photographer’s

cape over the house we live in,

we enter the darkness. See the light.

Day Without Sun

By Cameron Morse

Fog machine morning

our frog figurine lounges

in absolute recline, snail

facedown in the flowerbed’s

understory of oak leaves,

its whiskers of catmint.

Theo rolls over the happy turtle

below blown-out garden mums.

Real oak leaves dock

in mock vegetable garden slots

for rubber carrot, plastic onion,

and radish in the Little Tikes

cottage. Canadian geese,

hidden in cloud, creak like swings

in the playground of one cloud

smothering the daylong sun,

a dark station poised like a curse,

hollow culm that I am. Somewhere

in the whiteout, sirens blare.

Silence, somewhere, is making

a bed for me. Climb in, says

silence, be tucked

in calm, earless on your hands

scrabbling the braille of acorns.