I bought black flowers today.
Black Satin petunias.
And they really are black.
Like the shadows of petunias.
My wife says I bought them
because I’m in love with death.
I say I bought them b […]

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Simone Weil
Love is not merely an emotion. It is a meltdown that reestablishes a more unified space of brilliance, goodness, and sadness. This is the real function of love […]

Carol Jeffers is an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2020 Essay/Memoir Contest
“Stephanie wanted you to have her eyes,” her sister Susie said. “Please say you’ll take them.” That was in 2018, the second ti […]

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Many readers may feel that the disrupting Covid-19 pandemic has changed poetry and more broadly the arts, forever. This may be true as many activities are now on-line and […]

The following is a conversation with Karin Cecile Davidson, whose first novel, Sybelia Drive, is being published this fall by Braddock Avenue Books (October 6th).
Sybelia Drive is a Vietnam-era novel that tells […]

The Day His Dad Died
                     for PK

The phone rings and the news
swells and pitches like a sleeper
tossing on his thin mattress
of goodbyes. Your father
lay down, jabbed his pale finger
in […]

On walks, I find feathers, seed pods, pieces of wood, leaves, flowers, sticks, papers, plastic and metal things, pieces of glass, strings, all object […]

Duck prints score the pond,
the one out my window,
the one where an egret
roosts come spring,
the one where a blue heron
fishes in summer,
the one where nuthatches
sip drips on the […]

Travel has always been important to me. It’s about adventure, experience, and cultures that are different from my own. Cuba intrigued me for all these reasons. In 2018, I felt it would be a fleet […]

It’s a common situation. In a closely-knit global community we find ourselves communicating in several languages.

The best part is that we don’t necessarily need to be conversant in the said lan […]

Once a week a Sergeant and a Driver were detailed to take the garbage from the Camp mess hall and dump it at the impromptu garbage dump out on the far end of the runway.

In a country where much of the rural […]

Toward the evening of the night I thought my mother was dying, the aide, who stayed with mom during the day, told me mom had been asleep for twenty-four hours and would not wake up. She sent me a picture of my […]

Mary Alice Hostetter is an Honorable Mention in Streetlight Magazine’s 2020 Essay/Memoir Contest
The first thing I noticed was the sign. My mother and I were driving back from getting corn meal at the mill, and […]

First Sonogram
Seen from your upper
window, down the block
at some remove,
an Edward Hopper black and white
and grainy through the screen,
a street lamp’s cone
shines down. There,
you notice a f […]

When we held our essay/memoir contest last spring, we had such a wealth of wonderful entries, it was very hard to pick the winners. I think we did a good job—certainly the best we could—but in the process we […]

There is a perfection
to the mockingbird’s song
dropped from a black wire,
to the white slashes
of his spread tail feathers
against this deep, clean blue.
The choral repertoire
of his hopes is […]

The ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement and the overthrow of apartheid symbols in the Capital of the Confederacy made me think of some of the things I heard when we lived there:
–The South will rise […]

Revolution
He watches the tail lights of her car
disappear down the rutted driveway,
throws a hammer after her
yells don’t come back

He turns towards his trailer
weeds pushing through the metal s […]

During the months of our restricted movements, my wife and I have continued our nearly daily walking. Although we had developed the habit pre-Covid for the health of our bodies and minds, the pandemic has […]

“I told you we should have made reservations,” Maya said.

“But this trip was supposed to be about spontaneity.”

Maya and Zephyr were driving across the country in their new used RV. They were celebra […]