Succor by Brett Ann Stanciu When the pandemic first shut down our world in the spring of 2020, my fifteen-year-old daughter and I were at home, every day, all day. I had been a […]

Masterpieces are hard,
manifestos, conversation
pieces are easy. Here’s
a woman who does sculptures
of babies popping out of
toasters, the whole thing
drenched in a combination
of blue and yellow p […]

Growing up in a small rural town, I felt a strong sense of family, community, and safety.

We had farmers’ markets, county fairs with greased pigs, hayrides, pie eating contest, cake walks, musical chairs, b […]

Margaret Watson is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2022 Flash Fiction Contest

I try my best to ignore the telephone vibrating in my back pocket. I focus on what I am doing–massaging St […]

I began photographing at sixteen when I got my first paycheck from the local movie theater to purchase a 35 mm film camera, a Canon EOS Rebel G. The camera then never left my side the rest of high […]

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 […]