I had what most people would describe as a full-time mother. I believed this, not knowing that other kids had mothers who didn’t get weary of their lives, who didn’t need to box themselves into their bedrooms from time to time. Since I can remember, my mother would sometimes hide for days, wrapping herself in her ivory sheets, sleeping or eating toast with margarine and jam from a small plate my father would bring her. Then,one morning, she’d be in the kitchen when I got up for school, drinking coffee as if nothing had happened, … Continue reading Something Like Poker by Amy Grier →
Two years ago I couldn’t have even told you that Carson McCullers was female. My familiarity with Southern Gothic was that limited. But this summer I found myself haunting Columbus, Georgia, her birthplace, seeking some sort of connection with the woman who wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Like Mick Kelly or Jake Blount, peripatetic characters from that book who wandered the streets of what is only a thinly-veiled Columbus, I walked the city, past the old cotton mills along the Chattahoochee, down by the old bus station from which Antonapoulos, “the obese and dreamy … Continue reading A World Intense and Strange →
Beyond the obvious grief of losing a parent or relative to old age, there is a particular tragedy that accompanies a person’s passing rarely whispered inside the comfortable blandness of funeral homes or over the open caskets of the recumbent dead: the tragedy of discovering lives left unfinished and dreams unfulfilled while cleaning out the lingering personal effects of the departed. In my lifetime so far, I have sorted and removed the orphaned belongings from the homes of three people that have escaped their corporal lives: a woman in Boca Raton, Fl, whom I only … Continue reading Post Mortem Clean-Up →
I live in a town where the writer who cranks it out rakes it in. I can’t get past page three in any of John Grisham’s books before I give up. Those books are page-turners though, you betcha, the whole who-dun-it thing, the thriller. Characters so thin you see right through them. People in my town, Charlottesville, Virginia, are so besotted with his celebrity they make a habit of dropping by the bookstore where he signs absolutely anything anyone wants in the frontispiece of his books. I have waited years for some reviewer to break … Continue reading At Least I’m Potatoes →
Over the past year, I watched Mike, one of my best friends, die of a brain tumor. In the midst of this misery, I came to think about things that make life worth living. Foremost is love, of course, but after that comes music. Music is a nondiscursive joy, like a view of mountains on a clear-blue day, that pulls one into the moment. To experience music is to forget everything else, to be here now. I say “experience” music rather than “listen to” music. Like most people, I enjoy listening to music; it provides … Continue reading Music Medicine →
Streetlight Magazine is the non-profit home for unpublished fiction, poetry, essays, and art that inspires. Submit your work today!
