For my sake

At dawn there are no residues left from last night’s shift.
I offer no sympathy to the crawling hours
of a newborn day.
With fog I travel across the city
to buy a large coffee with half-half c […]

There’s a line in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God that I’ve always loved. After revealing some painful family history, Nanny tells her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, “Put me down easy […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Susan Muse has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest
 

Clouds flatten against a gray sky

and cover what had once been the color

of bluebonnets only a moment ago.

Suddenly […]

“A vegetarian walked into a bar. . . . I only know because he told everyone within two minutes.” That joke perfectly encapsulates why I never tell anyone that I am a vegetarian. I either hypocritically write a blo […]

Streetlight Voices: Short Fiction & Memoir · The Murmuration by S.W. Gordon
 

Podcast: The Murmuration is story about bad choices.

A fictional story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story on […]

Wendy Jean MacLean is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2020 Poetry Contest

Fenced in by the property owner
the beehive hut
of an Irish monk
still stands
as it has for fourteen […]