Corsets of snow belly-bust traffic in Chicago,
mercifully blurring the blocky derangements
of Mies van der Rohe’s window arrangements.
You look from Floor 23 down at Michigan Avenue,
wax maudlin for a p […]

There’s a scuba certification center in the middle of the desert, promising a deep heated pool. There’s a billboard with a picture of an elderly couple smiling for the camera, the woman wrapping her arms aro […]

Wednesday night in Deep Ellum, the eclectic little arts neighborhood lingering in the shadow of I-45 east of Dallas’s downtown. Ever since the 19-teens when Blind Lemon Jefferson came to the barbershops and d […]

The dog had gotten out, slipped out, wriggled out, sneaked out. Too smart for her own good—clever at door latches, willing to bide her time when the mood was on her to go solo. You’d think it was too cold to wan […]

From impressionism to pointililsm to my nursery-school grandboy’s stick figures with appendage-sprouting-heads, the outward expression of other peoples’ internal creativity knocks me out. Whatever it is. […]

 
I spent my childhood hiking Long Mountain just south of Lynchburg, Virginia. Christmas of 2000, when I was twelve, my aunt gave me a 35mm camera so that I could share the places I discovered with others. […]

If you’re standing on a pink sand beach in the Caribbean, the sun burning your back and monstrous thunder speaking to you across the salt water, you should probably listen. I should’ve listened. The sky roared at […]

Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence. James Ragan’s Too Long a Solitude. Jane Brox’s Silence: A Social History. Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude…

Is it just a coincidence, or did I subconsciously start r […]

For the seventh time I have pierced
My heart, bleeding and beating
Autonomous of my rib cage.
Yet despite the pain,
My tears are gilded on a face
Lily white
And no matter how I am pierced
I still think the […]

K.E. Ogden is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Short Fiction Contest.

One short-haired, German Rex single-owner cat about one year-old, up-to-date on shots, I think, although Mom got a […]

Nature itself is meaningless; it is only as we interpret it that it has meaning.
John Canaday, What is Art?

In our side yard a walnut grows. Higher than the house, it is 104 inches in circumference at chest […]



Podcast: What’s left after a bad relationship?

A short story performed by Joe Guay.

Read the story online: The Arithmetic of Love by Deborah Prum

At a recent conference I attended, a young woman stepped to the microphone to address keynote speaker Nick Flynn. “I teach yoga at the same homeless shelter where you worked in Boston. Your book Another Bullshit N […]

when the horizon dips
into darkness unsure about dawn,
I touch the faded photo, your face
still wearing a mere wisp of pink
blurred now into brushed-aside memories.

death is a trickster. it comes and […]

I despise Halloween.

I don’t wish ill of others. I hand out candy. I praise fairies and princesses, soldiers and supermen. I even humor parents who dress infants as vegetables or baby birds—but all the whi […]

All my life I’ve been attracted to weird things. And all my life I’ve been very much aware that other people think I’m weird for being attracted to those weird things. Sometimes it’s that I can’t help but be dr […]

Julia Ballerini is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Short Fiction Contest.
I was persuaded, if not coerced, to join a group therapy session. My boss was concerned about my mental well-being. I […]