Mindfulness Without the “Meditation” by Renee Branson

Photo looking up through tops of trees
 

Meditation has been proven to manage stress and anxiety, increase focus, and interrupt negative thought patterns. For a variety of reasons, however, many people don’t feel that traditional meditation is for them: it feels “too woo-woo,” or counter to their practice of faith, or seems connected only to the practice of Buddhism. It needn’t be any of those things. In its simplest terms, meditation is the use of a technique to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state. Still, whatever a person’s reluctance towards meditation, no practice … Continue reading Mindfulness Without the “Meditation” by Renee Branson

Why My Father Cannot Lay a Stone Wall by Gina Malone

Stone wall leading to white house
 

Gina Malone is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest Why My Father Cannot Lay a Stone Wall Nearly eighty now he drags out the soft middles of words when he plunders his past, sweeping disparate bits into piles his voice steps around. I always wanted to learn how to build stone walls, he says. ……………………………………………Eyes elsewhere he tells of a man ……………………………………………he knew when he was young, ……………………………………………an old man who said he would ……………………………………………teach him how to build a wall, to lay stone level upon stones in layers of orderly precision. … Continue reading Why My Father Cannot Lay a Stone Wall by Gina Malone

Places To Go Things To See by Richard D. Key

podcast fiction
 

Streetlight Voices: Short Fiction & Memoir · Places To Go Things To See by Richard D. Key Podcast: Places to Go Things to See is a wry travelogue. A fictional story performed by Jennifer Sims. Read the story online: The Murmuration by S.W. Gordon Jennifer Sims is an actor and voice over artist who has voiced hundreds of projects across all genres. After attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts she wandered into a career in advertising. She worked as an ad agency producer for ten years before she found her way back to her … Continue reading Places To Go Things To See by Richard D. Key

Dante-Inspired Works by Tom Duff

Illustration of man surround by woods
 

From an early age I enjoyed drawing, and in later years took up oil painting and etching as well. Eventually I decided to go into art full time, which I have continued to do, putting on paper images that simply come to mind, but also illustrating scenes from Dante’s Divine Comedy and other literary works. In my mid-fifties I happened to pick up a copy of the Inferno, the first of the three sections of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (the others being Purgatorio and Paradiso) and found myself mesmerized by the poetry and the vividly … Continue reading Dante-Inspired Works by Tom Duff

This Mouse Drowns by Mercury-Marvin Sunderland

Rain drops sliding down window
 

  The sound of rain. It gently taps on the roof. The blinds are closed, but you can see that outside there are a few other green apartment buildings surrounded by an evergreen forest. The branches are dotted with white frost that can be mistaken for snow. But it’s not snow. It just looks exactly like it. You pull up the blinds just to make sure. No, it’s not snow. On the forest floor below you can see great big puddles welling up over dead leaves. The rain starts slowing down. It stops. The world … Continue reading This Mouse Drowns by Mercury-Marvin Sunderland

Reading the Signs by Patricia Hemminger

bison drawing on rock
 

  As the East’s Songbird Epidemic Fades, the Cause Remains Unknown ………………….—Audubon Magazine, September, 2021 Fifty thousand starlings swoop above the marshes, wings drum in unison, roar in the crepuscular sky. Black shapes cluster, shift and swerve, entanglement at play, then coalesce, morph into a snake with twitching tail, then giant cells that merge again, give birth to prehistoric forms like dancing aurochs on cave walls. Roman augurs read these signs to interpret gods’ desires: when to fight, when to wait, what the cause, who escape. What sibyls now can tell us why songbirds fell, … Continue reading Reading the Signs by Patricia Hemminger

Bonfire of the Vanities: Coming to a School Board Near You by Deborah M. Prum

Photo of cover of Rats, Bulls, and Flying Machines
 

Twenty years ago, a reporter called me with bizarre news, so bizarre that I instantly wrote him off as a prank caller. He claimed he was from a town out West, maybe in Colorado? I am fuzzy on the details. I didn’t write down a word he said because I didn’t believe he could be serious. He asked if I was the author of Rats, Bulls and Flying Machines: A History of the Renaissance and Reformation. I replied in the affirmative, wishing he’d get to the point. At the time, I worked from home, a home … Continue reading Bonfire of the Vanities: Coming to a School Board Near You by Deborah M. Prum

Shadows and Bird of Youth, 2 poems by Joseph Monaghan

shadowy old camera and photos on table
 

Shadows His light bulb dims, and it’s dark enough for shadows revealed. A surprise every time. Strangers rush from nothing to a glittering blue pool. Ships resemble chess pieces from the mist of a balcony. Dock leaves on nettle stings. A lie in a fortune cookie. Paperbacks and Polaroids line the shelves of the bookcase, collected like porcelain angels on a Catholic’s mantelpiece. It’s all a Kodak distraction from being born of bone instead of what gods are made of —-shadows and celluloid. His mother’s still alive. With curlers in her hair, she’s framed on … Continue reading Shadows and Bird of Youth, 2 poems by Joseph Monaghan

Re-Wilding by Laura Marello

Photo of purple marigolds
 

There is a 1990s concept, or perhaps an older concept made new and currently gaining currency, called “re-wilding.” It is the prospect of making tamed and domesticated things wild again. Since 2008 or so, this concept has skyrocketed in book titles, and I imagine other places. It was originally used by Michael Soulé in the 1990s to capture the idea of restoring a landscape to its original wild state by introducing keynote species, native plants, and thereby allowing the natural environment to slowly return, restore itself. The major example was returning wolves to Yellowstone. But … Continue reading Re-Wilding by Laura Marello

Salt by Les Brown

Photo of salt mounds
 

What man would not look back when claiming a celestial voice commanded him to go away from pleasures of wine, games of chance, lust, secular music, dance, art, poetry? The men who deny life’s gifts and joy, who kneel and coerce in the name of one unknown, unseen, beyond reason or proof, men who control by unified power and fear deemed it so that woman should not turn lest she turn to a pillar of salt. The greater choice is to turn, to escape the clutches of piety and power at any cost, becoming salt … Continue reading Salt by Les Brown

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