Hello Book Lovers!
I’m happy to share that my novel, The Book Lovers, will be published in October 2023 by Regal House Publishing, a small, highly congenial press that specializes in literary fiction. Set in G […]

When Stevie Nicks was a witch in Florida, I sent her letters on stationery purchased from the canteen.

The new girl at the youth residential center told me her mother was Stevie Nicks, and also a witch. I […]

Victoria Korth is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest

Treatment Team
Found lying in a parking lot
on Union Street, close to the shelter

where she’d been in flight
from a husband w […]

In the small Appalachian town where I was born lived a squat, bowlegged, hairless doctor. Some called him a quack and a dope fiend, but in 1954 he delivered me on his dining room table, spanked me ‘til I c […]

Meditation has been proven to manage stress and anxiety, increase focus, and interrupt negative thought patterns. For a variety of reasons, however, many people don’t feel that traditional meditation is for t […]

Gina Malone is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2021 Poetry Contest

Why My Father Cannot Lay a Stone Wall
Nearly eighty now he drags out the soft
middles of words when he plunders his past,
sweeping […]

Streetlight Voices: Short Fiction & Memoir · Places To Go Things To See by Richard D. Key
Podcast: Places to Go Things to See is a wry travelogue.

A fictional story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the […]

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 […]