From the Flume
The banks of the West Ausable River

Is a place you’ve never been.

Staring straight down into the flume

Violent bursts of water over

Great granite boulders mesmerizes

The boys, but I […]

So, you’ve read a literary magazine’s guidelines, you’ve even read its sample poems available online, or ordered a recent copy of the magazine to learn about what they publish. Maybe you’ve taken a class/w […]

because hope is a motherfucker,
i went up to each house of the dead
and knocked, but no one answered.

still, i am haunted:
the sun sets a little dimmer ever since the last
feeble twitch of that cat’s t […]

                                
I paint to find out what I think about the world; to discover the things I do not have words for. With collage, I love the randomness of the sn […]

My wife wants me to write my own obituary. Write a draft in the third person and revise it as many times as it takes to produce a short, readable account of a life that will make sense, if at all, only in […]

lopes as only
Hare can, all
fits and starts,
ears sky-sieves
for the whoosh
wings and clenched
claws make
as death stoops
towards him—
but not today,
the sky
bluebare serene
in the heat, the
great r […]

I live a runaway life. I’m a writer, a wife, and a mother and, like a lot of women who tire of the multi-layered duties that come with that combination, I need to get away. Right now, what I’m running away fro […]

Bill Bruce is the 1st place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Short Fiction Contest.

“Hey”
                                   “hey”
“What’re you up to?”
                                   “not […]

She’s been sitting on the feeder
since first light, gathering herself,
I suppose, for the journey south.
I wonder if she slept there, waking
for a sip from time to time, adding
calories, planning her long, w […]

Pocast: Coming of age.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: Vanilla Music for Sinister Women Coming of Age by Mark Galarrita

I’ve been interested in photography since I was twelve years old. I grew up in North Miami Beach in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood. In middle school, my mother sent me about an hour away […]

Co-judging the annual fiction competition with Suzanne Freeman is a little like being each other’s plus-one at a silent auction. We independently review the wares that are displayed on a virtual table, offerings […]

His breakfast smells like ripe tomatoes
and promises,
pledged in youth and romance,
a starter home, a child or two,
a job with promotions and perks,
naive happiness.

We are older now,
each creak and […]

When I was seven, I made my own journal out of legal pad paper—a little book that sparked a lifelong passion for writing down my thoughts, feelings and desires. E.M. Forster asks, “How do I know what I think u […]

I try to find beauty
………in the autumn night.
Your stars, your moon,
they’re still right there where you left them
………But without you
they seem merely splinters of glass
soon to be swept into w […]

The gravedigger called, annoyed that I was not at the cemetery where he was waiting to lay my father’s stone marker. I’d expected his call en route and said I would get there as fast as p […]

In Alice Sebold’s book Lucky, a memoir of her brutal rape as a college freshman, a policeman tells her she was lucky. He meant she was fortunate to have been raped and beaten rather than being raped and m […]

Our beckoning cabby
from Tunisia,
snaked through preposterous traffic,
past the icy neon signs
and the greening fragrance of stacked Christmas pines,

to the Met
where I almost cried, nearly blind
from Van […]