Beauty of Decay: Photographs by Daniel Pravda
I grew up in Virginia Beach where I witnessed damage and destruction of rural and natural lands for the lie called development. I feel levels of anger and disappointment when I see greed eclipsing nature. As poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “Aftercomers cannot guess the beauty been.” I now drive around Eastern Virginia and North Carolina and search for ways to preserve rural and natural beauty. This beauty manifests to me in rusting barns, abandoned homes, churches and schools, forgotten tractors, trucks, and plows, as well as … Continue reading Beauty of Decay: Photographs by Daniel Pravda
William Crawford’s DRIVE BY SHOOTING
Some of America’s greatest photographers roamed the country by automobile. They forever changed the context of artistic imagery. They eventually replaced traditional monochrome with color, and they shot the unnoticed aspects of the backside of our country. Stephen Shore, Bill Eggleston, and Lee Friedlander were well known, working members of this New York school of photography. I am their present day disciple. An avid minimalist shooter, I helped to invent “forensic foraging,” a throwback approach to modern digital photography. The heavily saturated, vivid color of these pictures drive the work. The subject matter is often banal … Continue reading William Crawford’s DRIVE BY SHOOTING
Self, Expression by Anne Holzman
Anne Holzman is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight‘s 2020 Flash Fiction Contest I hear you before I see you. I start working on arranging my face. There’s the ding-ding of the elevator, the door opening, your father’s voice. Your father is a good husband. He visits me every day, except once in a while he doesn’t come. On those days, the elevator doors open, and it isn’t him, and they open a while later and I can smell the supper cart and I know for sure he’s not coming. Those are hard days. … Continue reading Self, Expression by Anne Holzman
Leitmotif by Terry Cox-Joseph
You would think that as an artist, I would not struggle to describe the leitmotif of my paintings, yet I find myself searching for identifiable techniques, common hue or echoing tableau. How to connect lost edges of watercolor to hard edge of acrylic? Or should those edges connect to the cosmos? How to lift lines, meld secondary and tertiary hues? Or should the lines lift off from NASA, taking with them my paper, brush, arm? Shall I cut in with angular brush? Better yet, cut in with a knife? Yes, that would lend interest— … Continue reading Leitmotif by Terry Cox-Joseph
Day Five Million by Emily Littlewood
I’m bored. Really, really bored. Since the cases of COVID went back on the rise about a month ago I’ve been put back on shelter-in-place orders. Since my transplant I’ve been immunosuppressed, so I have to be extra careful right now. And until there’s a vaccine. While I’m lucky enough to live in the perfect spot for walking, it’s only a small reprieve. I still have to come back home. I’ve sewn masks, colored, organized, puzzled, read, watched a ton of crap TV. I may have finished Netflix, and I’m about one more isolated week … Continue reading Day Five Million by Emily Littlewood
Learning the Names of Flowers and As Close as They can Whir to the Porch Light, 2 poems by Rodney Torreson
Learning the Names of Flowers Each day, when my wife reaches inside the mailbox, her eyes catch on the bright morning glories, whose vines have twirled up the post with glad faces. Somehow they know, better than she, her hidden will, that it’s for them she settles a foot on every porch step, one arm bearing the bluster of the bushes before she lingers in her strides toward the street, all the while maintaining an eye with irises and white gardenias, so that I’m surprised their spell has not swept her from our cares, drifted … Continue reading Learning the Names of Flowers and As Close as They can Whir to the Porch Light, 2 poems by Rodney Torreson
A Capital Morning on Virginia’s Eastern Shore by Alex Joyner
You tiptoe back towards religion, in my experience, cautiously and nervously and more than a little suspicious, quietly hoping that it wasn’t all smoke and nonsense, that there is some deep wriggle of genius and poetry and power and wild miracle in it, that it is a language you can use to speak about that for which we have no words. —Brian Doyle, A Prayer for You & Yours Those trees just there were purple a half-hour ago. The kind of mango purple that only appears on winter mornings when the sun’s light has … Continue reading A Capital Morning on Virginia’s Eastern Shore by Alex Joyner
No IOU’s and The Path Ahead, 2 poems by Evalyn Lee
No IOU’s where were we when the planet became death remember the small dark seed that shaped a new way remember when small and weak became large and capable and that when we tell the dead we see them the tragedy and the vengeance that fells a heart falls away and yes we fear change and fall apart when death arrives and yes we want the hands that feel the feet that walk the eyes that see even here at the edge where death wakes and strange events taste the mystery here we meet pray … Continue reading No IOU’s and The Path Ahead, 2 poems by Evalyn Lee
Erebus by Patrick Christie
The Captain had not been himself ever since we extracted the frozen bird carcass from the ice. He had become withdrawn, seeking solitude, showing disinterest in his duties even as four of his men resided in the makeshift infirmary, coughing up blood all hours of the day. The expedition had begun without incident. We departed from the Port of Bluff in New Zealand on the 3rd November and spent only five days caught in pack ice in our passage across the Ross Sea. We entered McMurdo Sound under sail and landed on Ross Island … Continue reading Erebus by Patrick Christie
Stripping by Vicky Oliver
Vicky Oliver is an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Essay/Memoir Contest It was an orgy of silk and satin and velvet. Twenty cocktail dresses sprawled on my floor, all temptresses still in their peak, wanting to be touched, craving admiration. They each had their stories and I thumbed through them the way most people listen to golden oldies, remembering with a mixture of awe, sadness, and a lurch of nostalgia that tugs somewhere between the heart and the gut. This was me, I thought. They all were, and not so very long ago. The sleeveless, … Continue reading Stripping by Vicky Oliver