Once the Thunder Stops

and it’s safe to venture out, we walk
to the end of the drive, out to the road,
through the mire & torn branches.
The smell of our wood fire mingles

with eucalyptus. We have only t […]

Mountain spruce
on upward slopes:
their pale under-blue
unwraps the clouds
in their slow round
of visiting.
We taste tracery
of strange soaps
on our skins. You
turn towards me,
awake […]

Like most people, I have done things that I wish I had not done, but it seems rare that something I am sorry I did is linked inextricably to something else I am glad to have done.

Growing up in a middle-class […]

I’m dreaming. I am in my old life, the life that no longer exists. I am married and I have a daughter, although in the dream she is young and not an adult. And things are going wrong. We are in the midst of a l […]

Many of my art works are rooted in science with an affinity for outer space. In June 1969, as America fulfilled J. F. Kennedy’s dream to put the American Stars and Stripes into the dusty surface of the […]

Twin sisters Fuchsia & Diamond,
twins in the sense they matured
in the same kiln, not expelled
from one womb, dance to punk
band A Testament Of Youth,
Tuesday night, Dugan’s Deli,
Iowa State U […]

The New Year’s Eve party was near Times Square in the building then housing Show World Center. You sat on my friends’ laps and mine inquiring about our salaries. John had the features of a Jones Beach […]

Happy holidays to you and yours from the staff at Streetlight Magazine!
 

Men croon
playful puns about you.
Men legislate, fix
your tan tunic
and wide bulb
with geography.
Men say your sweetness comes
from the soil,
comes from a depression-era accident
from a patch of sandy […]

We put the canoe in, Sophie and I, before the sun had warmed the pond and the fog had dissipated. Enveloped by the smell of damp-draped earth, we paddled in silent synchrony, each paddle angled […]

Although I have always considered myself a writer, I have also spent many years not writing. In fact, for most of high school, college, and my 20s, I didn’t write at all. Not one story, not one poem. During that p […]

Podcast: A passing train, snapshots of life.

A short story performed by Joe Guay.

Read the story online: Calico Cat by William Cass

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. […]