By Ross Taylor STEADY WORK Our drummer stopped too soon but we kept on– like walking off a cliff across the air. I played for her and him and others gone, the wasted dancers hopped a little more. I must repeat this till I get it right: at last she feared my nightly transformations. Her tears for me have cooled to silver bullets. And this: the hospital clocked his final minute then old deserted new as per tradition– all the newborns wailed under the lights. Dance without drums, love only rhyme, bury the … Continue reading Part of the Past→
by Patrice Calise When I was a little girl, I wanted to be one of the boys. No shock there: I grew up in a house with four older brothers, our parents, and several male dogs. My brothers got to run bare-chested in the heat of South Florida summers while I was encumbered with a full t-shirt and eventually (horribly) a bra. (I’d tried walking through the house without a t-shirt when I was 11. It didn’t end well). My brothers just never seemed bothered by their bodies because nobody ever seemed to be observing … Continue reading Gorilla My Dreams→
By Phyllis Leffler American cities can and should be places of civic history and civic virtue. Most are not. My city of Charlottesville is not – despite its progressive government and mostly well-intentioned citizenry. Its monuments to history embed narratives that disrespect large numbers of us. The people represented in its Civil War and Jim Crow statues glorify those who would maintain slavery, fight to divide the American union, and seek to maintain white supremacy by promoting the Lost Cause once the war ended. To become the city that fully justifies its reputation as one … Continue reading Bringing Art to a Charlottesville Conversation→
By Janis Jaquith Is it pathetic that my gray roots are showing? What about wearing yoga pants to the grocery store – are people thinking I should know better? Women have always been subject to physical scrutiny and now there’s the added hell of being judged by our work/life balance. Lean into your career and neglect your family. Stay home with the kids and lose ground in your career. We’re zealots. We’re slackers. I feel like I’m tap-dancing for an unseen audience, hoping I’m good enough. Good enough for what, I’m not sure. To occupy … Continue reading Do They Think You’re Good Enough? How to Stop Giving a Rat’s Ass→
By Stefanie Newman I spent most of my life at a loss for words. On job interviews I could never describe my good points or my bad. As an art professor I would get student evaluations that said She was nice but I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Life’s important moments found me rooting around for words with the dogged persistence of somebody looking for their car keys I had a reverence for language that only a visual artist could have. Color and form were slippery and vague, but I was sure that … Continue reading When Words Fail→
It was like one of those dreams where you’re trying to reach someone in a crowd and you keep glimpsing the back of their head before they’re swallowed up by the thick humanity. The crowd is impermeable— you try elbowing your way through, but it closes in on you again and you find you haven’t advanced. You’re panicking. You have no voice. It wasn’t a dream, though, and I didn’t need to use my elbows—I just couldn’t get to you. You kept disappearing around corners, into rooms, your shadow bending all over the wallpaper and … Continue reading The Space Where You Were by Nina Denison→
K. Douglass Hopkins, DMV, is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2016 essay/memoir contest. I sighed as I loaded my duffle into the Trooper, reluctant to leave for a long weekend at the emergency veterinary hospital. It had been one of those perfect early spring days that, slanting now towards a soft peeper-filled dusk, had transported my mind to vanished places and long gone years. The sun, warm across my shoulders as I planted early peas, struck through the bare tree limbs onto flattened taupe grasses and crispy dead leaves. A light breeze replaced the … Continue reading A Matter of Perspective by K. Douglass Hopkins→
We Always Called Him Fletcher Never by his first name Albert, or Mr. Fletcher. He was tall as a sugar pine, skin the color of freckled walnuts, walked our whole neighborhood hauling an extension ladder from job to job, his back gospel-straight. I knew nothing beyond his easy manner, and that one summer morning when I rode with my dad to snag him from the Shell Station where out back he managed to unfold from a lean-to, tools in tow. There were easy lies about Fletcher. His thank-you-mam gratitude for a bologna sandwich served … Continue reading We Always Called Him Fletcher by Barbara Conrad→
Annette Boushey Holland is the 1st place winner winner of Streetlight’s 2016 essay/memoir contest. My last year of elementary school, at the end of the 50s, was also the end of my family’s life in Washington D.C., where we’d lived for four whole years. My father was in the Air Force, and we moved a lot while I was growing up. This time he was transferred to a small town in Tennessee, called Tullahoma, where he was to serve as commanding general of the nearby Air Force base. The first day at my new school, … Continue reading Heinz and the Hula Doll by Annette Boushey Holland→
Jennifer Cox is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2016 essay/memoir contest. Until I was six I was loud and my eyes lit up and family was everyone everywhere. Then my cousin Jeffrey died, and it took a year for the brain tumor to kill him. We were the same age, he was me, and I watched him die. It took a year for him to lose his hair, his sight, his hearing, his face, his hand/eye coordination. He taught me to tie my shoes and then he suddenly couldn’t put his on. He was … Continue reading No God or Stars by Jennifer Cox→
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