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The air tastes of spoiled milk a day ago something that was safe to drink Its molecules lock onto my skin follow me back to my hotel climb into bed with me They resist hot showers and rainstorms I want to crawl away I want to live […]
I. Out there, on the farm, it couldn’t have mattered less. Not that I was the only human among the beasts, but I was the only one of my kind, and still, it never mattered. II. We were, every one of us, coupled or not, quite lonely, so we became a pack […]
In that wood they built their house. You can’t see the ocean but you can smell the tide. He remembers birch sap under his nails, and April’s light. Foundation, beams, paint. Maybe he wanted to be a painter once. Maybe he danced. Surely he stood in front of the mirror practicing his songs. This is […]
Do everything you would do. Gone crazy in a fortune cookie. Every platitude held a poem. I wrote what cannot be read. Oh you missed it, time. Whole nights. Still need yesterday and forgot where it aches. May keep it real. You may be raining all day. Most of the sights were silent…I sang for your […]
You are the only one of your kind who does not return home to nest, opting, instead, to venture wherever you feel like, beaching new pockets of earth. Maybe your instincts have misfired, a product of mutated genes gone wrong, your idea of home morphed, lost in the translation of generations. Maybe you are too […]
Tomorrow, I’ll plant your post- sun, bury you in concrete cracks and unlit skies, praying— you’ll bloom still. If you grow, you’ll need water, but I’ve only known streams of white and yellow, of blur— traffic. Somehow, everyone has a you, a parked somewhere, a firefly […]
My father taught me to read a map, unfolding its mysterious symbology. Pointing out its legend, starburst beacons became illuminated lighthouses, while colorless roads, unimproved like myself, awaited discovery. Cartographic contours provided relief to the eye, an aesthetic guide for mapping out a life. He noted that north was a spatial orientation that put one […]
I think about guilt, at twenty-three, watching you bang on our dealer’s windows at 4 AM because the baggie ran out. And how, who I’ve become—a Writing Instructor, a Cedar Lake kayaker, an appreciator of pre-war motorcycles—is crazy different. How the poignancy of Maggie Anderson pops like graffiti on fresh brick; Bazooka Joe in my […]
I’m ripping out my garden, pulling dried tomatoes and zucchini plants from the hard, gray ground. I’m not doing this because summer is over, because the frosty nights warn us that one season is pushing on the back of another. It’s only July. I’m ripping out these plants nestled in the center of a community […]
The bus runs down Broadway, from the Bronx through Harlem out to Bowling Green. I listen to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, beginning with “So What” and I will reach, “All Blues”. A man boards the bus, carries a little girl, about three years old, and he takes the steps one-two-three, sure. His height, his […]
I, Achilles Petrakakis, knowing death to be not far distant, take up my pen to write this account in the 79th year of my life, at my house in the village of Galatas on the island of Crete on the 17th day of May, 2007. For days, that May of 1941, the sky had been […]
In October 1962, before I found the body of the dead woman, Roger and I climbed the Beanfield fence. My Keds slotted into chain link stirrups as I approached the helix of barbed wire at the top, wondering how the hell I would ever make it to the other side. At least the immediate terror […]
Summer’s growth…Autumn’s harvest! We’re happy to announce the winners of our summer contest – check them out below and click on the links to read their work. This was a special summer for us, as we tapped into our South Florida roots a little more and accepted poems written in English as well as Spanish. […]
Ximena Gomez is a Colombian poet, psychologist, and translator, who now lives in Miami. Her poems have appeared in Nagari, Conexos, Círculo de Poesía, Carátula, Raíz Invertida, Ligeia, La Libélula Vaga and Espacio poético 4, and bilingually in the North American journals Sheila-Na-Gig, Nashville Review, Cigar City and Cagibi. She was finalist for the Best […]
Kaylie Saidin After school ends at two-thirty and the bells ring out a long flat sound, stay-at-home mothers congregate in the parking lot outside the campus buildings. The mothers sign clipboards and collect their children, who pull their shirts and beg to stop for fast food on the way home. I watch out of the […]
Abigail Walthausen It was horrible to think that it was her first time with acrylic nails. Nat wasn’t usually about that sort of thing but she had come at it gradually. First with a gift certificate for a gel mani — a friend congratulating her on a new job, or consoling her maybe, insomuch as […]
Ashley Hand I’m waitressing in the Adirondacks for the summer, at an A-frame lodge on the lake in Saint George. We seat guests on the wraparound porch in the afternoons, once the rainstorms make their promenade across the water and gust over the village. My shift starts at […]
Ximena Gomez La casa estaba en silencio. El bombillo a punto de fundirse, Apenas iluminaba el corredor, La escalera al jardín. Por allí paseaba ella con el bastón. Ella decía que el corredor era Una calle con farolas Llenas de polillas. Bajo la luz mortecina se veía Pequeña y frágil. […]
Forester McClatchey Eating in the State of Flowers In Florida, the pigs eat escargot, the sluggish horses nibble Spanish Moss, the manatees hold feasts of watercress, and I can manage only dry Bordeaux before the steamed ricotta, basil, dough, and garlic of my favorite pizza place. I eat and watch the alligators pass along the […]
DOMINIQUE CHRISTINA is an award-winning poet, author, educator, and activist. She has authored four poetry collections: The Bones, The Breaking, The Balm: A Colored Girl’s Hymnal (2014), They Are All Me (2015), This Is Woman’s Work (2015), and her latest, Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems (2018). She holds five national poetry slam titles in four years, including […]
After finding a decade-old letter in the Gulf Stream editorial office from an inmate asking about free journal samples for submission guidelines, Samantha Leon has teamed up with GS-affiliated and independent writers alike to contribute to prison education. Over the next few weeks, Leon will keep a PO Box open for book donations, which will […]
The Gulf Stream Magazine Summer Writing Contest is open to writers of fiction and poetry. The winner in each genre will be awarded $100. The 2019 contest judges are Laura Lee Smith (fiction) and Ariel Francisco (poetry). Publication: The winning story and poem from the 2019 contest will be published in Gulf Stream Magazine and […]
Some ghosts are my fathers, forever testaments to ragelove, undertow, imprint of baseball stitches on the temple. Not king, not priest, not urchin, but sad patient drugged asleep in the psychiatric wing. Not all ghosts are fathers. I’ve counted them as I walk the suburbs. Some are rabbits wearing moonrise like an oversized firefighter’s […]
In my gym shoes, I drew the striped blocks of my Japanese name, strained and skewered during roll call until I sounded like an exotic bird or an Asian cell phone brand. People used to ask my mother where I was adopted. She did not give me her tall frame, pale eyes, […]
A consortium of hips, thick hips, the unionized and synchronized alike. Tough hips like rhino hides herringboned around the watering hole, assorted like the trove of rubber pencil tops we picked through in elementary school— do you remember mornings hunting for quarters, earned or not, for god knows what? It’s still […]
A couple of years ago I went out for a drink with a fellow I had briefly dated. Our dating was the kind that happens when you meet someone on vacation (in this case our best friends’ wedding), and keep in touch after you’ve returned to your respective cities. Emailing, talking on the phone, exchanging […]
a worn tide I retreat shallows joining the deep the way life crushes life thirst malignant in each arc’s rise sighs in its fall heartbeats lapping up hours before fading obscure in still chambers purled clean a crest glossed in sun breeze I’m no part of the swell after all maybe churned in its […]
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