Much has been going on in the blogger’s back-of-the-blog life, compounded with news of the nation. And frankly, I have been mulling for well over a week on how to say what I want to say; or how to say anything, f […]

Richard Key is the 1st place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2020 Essay/Memoir Contest
Honeybees are swarming outside my home office under the eaves of the roofline. I would say they are hovering like tiny […]

Building rituals out of nothingness,
I’m sitting on a park bench, reading
Wallace Stevens on a sunny day
when the flashing shadow of a crow
darkens my library book.
Perfect, I think.
Where are the t […]

Streetlight Voices: Short Fiction & Memoir · Firedamp by Tonja Matney Reynolds
Podcast: A story that captures the dimming light.

A fictional story performed by Joe Guay.

Read the story online: Firedamp […]

When self-isolation measures were first enacted, five-year-old Vivian seemed excited about the whole thing. A new experience, unique to this time and place. She was playing with her mom, she yelled from her porch, […]

Christmas Eve Parable
Phoebe, my five-year-old granddaughter adores the tiny
wax Jesus who lies in the cradle of the creche that came
down to us from now dead great grandparents. Wise men,
Mary and Joseph, two […]

Sometimes I am asked to compare current artwork to pieces of the last few years. I can only do so in the most general terms: the images of my newer digital paintings may be a little sharper and co […]

From beneath the dining room table he spots wisps of dust on chipped gray floorboards across the room. He hears his grandmother clop around the kitchen in her low-heeled shoes, into the pantry and out again. […]

CHOPIN’S HEART
A brief apocalypse has taken possession of my person.
The streets are full of melancholy.

Yesterday I fell asleep on the bus.
The sound of someone crying woke me.

Was it the woman slumped i […]

Yasser Alaa Mobarak grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. When the Egyptian Revolution started in 2011, he was an eighteen-year-old teenager. “The protest took place in Shatby Station, Alexandria. It called fo […]

I’ve been having some strange dreams lately, probably most of us have.

A cooked salmon lies in the middle of the highway, missing half his body, yet alive and showing no signs of distress. We all get out o […]

after Marie Howe
It doesn’t matter that the sugar maple is leaning
closer to the house, that the cluster of seeds
I planted yesterday will wash away.

Something doesn’t add up.
The dishwasher sti […]

The visit was long overdue. At my wife Margie’s suggestion, I decided to do something about it.

So, on a summer day that was forehead-dripping hot with a steely blue sky, the two of us strolled in shorts and s […]

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
 L.P. Hartley
That quote knocks me out so much I wanted to use it to launch into a safari through my own history. Perform a little dispassionate […]

At university, I lived on A Cappella Lane, which dead-ended at the railroad tracks. Elm cool, the house had ivy as a front ‘lawn’ chaperoned by a short picket fence. The landlady had a walk-in basement apa […]

Summer

Elmer Toon was always a little beyond the edge.

Elmer shot across the bridge from Dorsey Street and onto the big parking lot, head thrust out over the front wheel as he peddled full tilt on a […]

I run a writers’ retreat in a nineteenth-century farmhouse on the James River in Norwood, Virgina.  My quarters are at  the rear of the three-story house and consist of a large country kitchen with a woodstove, a […]

Daniel and I had done a lot of preparation for labor, I thought, but I never considered that it would start during the night.

I had pictured it many times and it was exclusively a daytime event. In fact, it […]