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 […]

 
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 […]

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 unis […]

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 […]

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 b […]

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 con […]

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 g […]

I wasn’t going to make it. I’d made a mistake; this whole stupid backpacking thing was a mistake. I trudged a step further. A young guy, about thirteen, with Keanu Reeves hair and an Osprey backpack loosely per […]

Lynn Coleman has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Art Contest
 

I moved to Southern California in 1962 from central California. The first wildfire I remember was in 1967 and started near […]

feels this way.
Familiar like the abstract
place you grab for
when you’re curled in despair
on your own kitchen floor
begging to go home,
not knowing where you mean.
No matter whose hair and b […]

I have always thought that John Donne’s metaphor of the drawing compass in “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” one of the most ingenious in English poetry. Not simply about two lovers parting, it descr […]

He looked small, curled up on her couch
this handsome boy/man
not looking at her
picking his fingernails
jiggling his foot
a whisper of a beard on his face
he was silent
she waited
he cleared his […]

I’ve noticed that when I get together with friends, we never ask each other, “Did you see [fill in the title of a television program that recently aired]?” as those of my generation once might have. Rather, the […]

Bukowski talked about it, the one he threw
through the window each drunken night
and it still played, a radio indestructible
with songs that couldn’t help but bead
against my forehead. I think of Jo […]

I’d met three of the Partons: Randy and Stella at a festival in Georgia when I was a kid and Dolly at a concert, where I snagged backstage passes from a friend who knew one of the backup singers. I recalled my p […]

The garden bridge, a subtle arc
that gathers to its bend
the mossy stones of either bank,
and to the water lends

a stagnant symmetry: the dark
tunnel above, the sky
afloat below. A tranquil […]

Robert Schultz is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2021 Art Contest

Robert Schultz considers himself a fortunate man. A retired Roanoke College English professor, he still follows his daily work […]

Swimming Again to Meet You,
along some enclosed lane where I pass you
swimming in the other direction.

Decades, I swam into changing light
that guided me to temporary rest—

So I begin again—

the lon […]

The first place winner of Streetlight’s art contest is Robert Schultz of Salem, Va. Schultz’s work, Specimens of the Plague Year, documents a year in the pandemic with his thoughts, quotes from scho […]

We met the ram yesterday. The one we were warned about but had forgotten was loose in the world.

After the biblical rains, the world felt charged as if pages in time had fallen open. With gaps just w […]