I was typing my alternate ID number into the keypad at my (formerly) favorite grocery store when the perky cashier asked if I qualified for Senior Discount Thursday. My finger froze midair.

“Excuse m […]

I have removed my shirt and am kneeling in a pit
looking up at a man pointing a rifle down at me.
Quiet, everything is eerily quiet now, the morning’s
hissed commands and scrape of shovels long gone.
Why w […]

Clichés abound this time of year. It’s the one season in which it’s OK to speak of holiday magic or lapse into sappy memories like those that surfaced recently when I ran across a 1956 photo of 4-year-old me on t […]

In his 1971 memoir, Me and the Orgone, Orson Bean recounted his life-changing experience undergoing orgone therapy, a body-mind psychotherapy developed eighty years ago by Austrian-born psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. […]

After I die,
prop the bones
of a beautiful bird
in my mouth.

Call a medicine woman
back from my home star.
Offer tobacco, cedar, sage, sweet grass,
the seven silent petitions of passage.

For all these […]

My name is Mario Loprete. I live in Catanzaro, a small Calabrian city in the south of Italy. We are in the land that the ancient Greeks called “Magna Grecia,” rich in culture and history.

I also travel a l […]



Podcast: When a woman faces the loss of a beloved, aging pet, she finds herself confronting her own experience with age and death.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: E […]

During a late afternoon P.E. class in fourth grade, my mother came looking for me on the playground in her leather boots that zipped to the knee. In those days she wore her brown hair in a short permanent wave […]

When whales and porpoises beach themselves en masse, people react and mobilize in response to the tragedy. The sight of cetaceans dying from dehydration or drowning, and the inevitability of their slow, suffering […]

Tara Lindis is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest.

The children do not have life jackets. We give them ours. Their slender arms slide through the adult sized holes, […]

It’s hard being human, especially when the world feels hard. Nowadays, we live in a fishbowl of constant exposure to the unnatural noise of unnatural tweets and digital pings, chimes, and chirps. I miss bird song […]

From Isamu Noguchi to Man Ray, Poston War Relocation Center, May 30, 1942
Here, in the internment camp
in the Arizona desert
our preoccupations have shrunk
to a minimum—
the intense dry heat,
afternoon d […]

Katherine Smith is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest.

The coffee was bitter and good in La Palette, Carol’s favored café off the Boulevard Saint Germain. Ten ye […]

The voice of the singer soared over the lyrics of the gospel choir that Easter morning a decade and a half ago. You plead my cause, You right my wrongs/ You break my chains, You overcome/ You gave Your life, […]

I was born in Montreal, Quebec. My parents were highly cultured people; they had a large collection of books on art, music and sculpture. I was a curious child and doubtless my parents’ interests rubbed […]

Red Road
 
From asphalt to gravel, from
              Gravel to that barely—what
                        I am searching for I do not
                                    […]

Christine West is the 1st place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest.

My social anxiety as a high schooler was grossly misdiagnosed as maturity by adults. I wasn’t seen as shy, b […]

“Simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.”

—Nan She […]

Paris Nocturne
 
The Eiffel Tower rounds its beacon—platinum to black—platinum
to black—waltzes the dark across the room. Upstairs, the couple is fighting

loud and rough. A bottle shatters against a wall. […]

Who am I?
Why am I here?
What do I want?
What do I offer?

Last week, when I attended an event about purposeful living, a group of 10 people meditated briefly and answered these same questions. We had agreed […]