Here Is the Paring Knife, Here Is the Metaphor

to cut the damaged parts away. So bruised and all.
Peeling the flesh of the torturer you become of yourself.
Here is the skin off your hand. The skin off your […]

Each week, my husband completes the New York Times Sunday Magazine crossword puzzle in about thirty minutes, leaving no square unfilled. He writes in pen and never crosses anything out. Starting at 1 Across, and […]

I live in a writers’ sanctuary, a nineteenth century three-story house overlooking the James and Tye Rivers. The back stairway off my kitchen leads to my office and bedrooms; a long narrow hall on the second floor […]

Incandescence

Few will understand.
Light bulbs, for heaven’s sake.
But I was awash the night I found
spares waiting to meet my need
and remembered when need
was swallowed by the dark.
My little stash of l […]

On the one-year anniversary of the Covid lockdown, my husband and I decided to visit the recently-reopened Museum of Modern Art (while double-masked and socially-distanced) in midtown Manhattan, and have dinner […]

Brush a thin film over the slit on your papered skin—
………..feel the throbbing start to numb.

Shields against……………………………..daily s […]

Yes, champagne, please. It’s a red letter day here at the essay/memoir neighborhood of Streetlight: time to announce (appropriate fanfare) the outcome of our sixth essay/memoir contest. It’s a time of hop […]

The summer I worked as a tour guide at the CN Tower, it was the tallest free-standing structure in the world. One thousand, eight hundred and fifteen feet tall.

On my first day there, I shadowed a colleague […]

My mother has forgotten about the sun
Her gaze gauzy, living room window
a bay shape she has always detested
Here comes the mailman

My father is in the Rehab Center
Our king and conqueror
of […]

There was small marble sculpture of an aged figure on an unpretentious pedestal near the eastern end of St. Donatus Park, a leafy space in the old city of Louvain, Belgium. The figure was that of a seated […]

“Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me.”

Some people are born with a different level of grace and goodness than the rest of us. My […]

I could have stayed married to David if he
wasn’t so unwaveringly chiseled. If his deceptively supple
face wasn’t so perfectly defined. If Michelangelo could
have given me a dress that was low […]

In a recent batch of ‘reviews’ from an online magazine, I was struck by the variety of descriptive words used to evaluate the thirty-five or so poems. They ranged from “funny,” “strong,” and “moving” to […]

Patricia Hemminger has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest
Consider the pattern of UV light
directing bees to the flower’s center.

Magnetic fields, unfelt by us
guiding geese i […]

Gary Beaumier has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest
Once I shuffled along the wings of biplanes
I know this because I always fall in my dreams
from very high and unsurvivable […]

There are audiobooks enhanced by the author’s voice reading their own words (Becoming by Michele Obama), and those where an otherwise terrific book in print is hindered by the author’s out-loud read (Kamala Har […]

On a windy day in December, just after the sun had set, I stepped out to go to the grocery store for milk. The wind whipped my hair across my glasses, and I didn’t see the uneven sidewalk by the Greek r […]

Ion Corcose has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest
When I first gazed upon the world,
eyes like a dragonfly over a field of grass,
I did not see lightning or crows,
or a camel […]

Clouds flatten against a gray sky

and cover what had once been the color

of bluebonnets only a moment ago.

Suddenly rain begins washing the windshield

as we turn and head for […]