When I was thirteen, my mother left us. It was on a Sunday and she knew that Daddy, my brothers and I were away, visiting a family out on the old Nashville road. A moving van pulled up to the duplex and my […]

Jeff Ventura has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2022 Essay/Memoir Contest
The love of a husband for a wife, of my father’s love for my mother, is scattered in my memory like peach blossoms after a […]

I found my calling on a bleak Sunday afternoon in the fall of 1958, standing at the edge of a fetid swamp, questioning why bad things happened to little children. It was the day four-year-old Billy Flynn […]

This is the place that emptied
my father, sucking him
through the tunnel of its straw.
Four days into a farewell
visit, I’ve overdosed
on sunlight, rousing the insomniac within.
The grass is g […]

There are two loves in my life, two passions on which I spend countless hours. On one side the world of science, biology, physiology, cells and smells, counters with a microscope, computers with software […]

….1. France. Poppies blooming blood.

Hedged by four sheets strung on wire, my grandparents
spent their wedding night, December 1917:
a New York married-barracks, moans muffled
the night before the men […]

Every year, hundreds of new books on productivity are published on Amazon. Out of all these books, a significant slice is dedicated to productivity for writers. Many of the titles promise to teach us how to write […]

“Lose something every day. Accept the fluster . . .” (Elizabeth Bishop)

Every once in a while I open
one of too-many, tiny

boxes, and there you are,
bright stab of memory: My bra […]

“An artist is said to be original exactly when he takes up the challenge of tradition and makes us see something more than we already knew.” Demetri Porphyrios. Classical Architecture.

I am a fund […]

Marie moved her mother Florence into an elder care facility only two months ago, but still got lost trying to find it. It was an incongruously red brick institutional building dropped into a suburban […]

I once held my cousin in a Dixie cup. At least a part of him. The improvised committal on the banks of Nottoway Swamp was a fitting send-off for a man who wanted no ceremony. Prone to eccentricity and melancholia […]

It’s wrong to feel lucky
when a poplar blooms.
…………Branches spit out slender pinks below low clouds.

In fields here, we find arrowheads.
Ancient whispers on the ridge. One death begs […]

Susan Valas is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2022 Essay/Memoir Contest
It’s a drizzly-gray day in the spring of 1966. I stroll out the back door and climb into my dad’s Thunderbird with minutes to spa […]

STREETLIGHT’S 2022 SUMMER FLASH FICTION CONTEST
Send us your shorts by July 11!
1st Prize — $125
2nd — $75
3rd — $50
Entry Fee: $10

CONTEST GUIDELINES:

Up to 500 of your best, previou […]

STREETLIGHT’S 2022 SUMMER FLASH FICTION CONTEST
Send us your shorts by July 11!
1st Prize — $125
2nd — $75
3rd — $50
Entry Fee: $10

CONTEST GUIDELINES:

Up to 500 of your best, previou […]

STREETLIGHT’S 2022 POETRY CONTEST
August 15 to October 31
1st Prize — $125
2nd — $75
3rd — $50
Entry Fee: $10 FOR UP TO 3 POEMS

CONTEST GUIDELINES:

Up to three of your best, previously unpubli […]

This year’s flash fiction contest brought many great stories . . . and hard choices. (Seriously, it’s no lay-up trying to determine a winner when you have two judges with different writing backgrounds […]

Vigil
Outside the nurses’ station,
third floor east, twilight spreads
its white canopy over
the busy avenue of bright buildings.
Down the hall, an orderly lofts a pale
sheet over a vacant bed.
In the next […]