Beauty in the Grey
 
I was born without a shadow.
Deftly estranged,
The way moisture collects
In the soot sky.
Relief is temporary
But the stark song of the crow
Shows beauty in the grey.
I saw your […]

I am a compulsive researcher. If it were not such a useful compulsion, I would need a twelve-step program to break the habit. I can get hooked on almost any research project, although I tend to obsessively […]

We have our entanglements and love affairs with places. “And the end of all our exploring,” T. S. Eliot promises, “will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Such knowledge may be […]

I hate the scent of imitation lemon in dish soap. It’s too concentrated to be authentic. But the scent will lose potency once I dilute it in water. That’s always the trick. Dilute what’s unpleasant. Dilute […]

One summer evening, long after dusk, I was relaxing on a porch in a comfy chair next to a novelist I’d just met when she softly announced, “The stars in the sky look like an ocean. But I’m high, so maybe that’s […]

Given her first crayons at three, Nancy Congress Bass drew a picture of a pink poodle. She loved the slew of cats housed down the street and would grow up to be an artist with a penchant for painting […]

One of Sharon Leiter’s myriad of roles and activities while living and working in the Charlottesville, VA community of scholars, teachers and writers was to serve as Poetry Editor of Streetlight Magazine from 2 […]

Autumn 2003

Beautiful, downtown Kents Store, Virginia boasts two businesses, a store with snacks and sodas where hunters register the deer they’ve just shot, and a funeral home (not for the deer). Across the r […]

***Karen Foster is an Honorable Mention for Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
 

We Girls sit close together in the backseat of the car: Mission Accomplished. The Presentation of Mary Academy se […]

Partial Obstruction
 
Four Frenchmen
in a Fiat fractured
the front of a frieze
facing Florence Cathedral.

Stupid consonant clusters
crowding each other, bragging like teens
and gawking like tourists […]

Podcast: A man’s loss of a role in his bowling group means more to him than even he realizes.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: Keeping Score by Lawrence Farrar

Choosing between life in a library or a museum—either choice seems disloyal to the other. As a poet I revel in language. I splash in sacred waters, words swirl around me like schools of fish in streams of i […]

***John Gredler is an Honorable Mention for Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
 

I now had the second floor at 3 East Third to myself, a mattress on the floor, my radio cassette player and piles of bo […]

The Interloper
 
Night is an interrogative. The owl’s questions
float in the glen where shadows voiced
by the articulate moon stilt their own ground,
measure the trees for graves. The back
of the in […]

Things that get in the way, viz., from Online Etymology Dictionary:
1530s, from Latin obstructionem (nominative obstructio) “an obstruction, barrier, a building up,” noun of action from past participle stem of […]

***Erin Levens is an Honorable Mention of Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
 

I know I’m falling asleep when I slip under the cowcatcher onto a bed of hay. Strands of hay poke through the bars of iron […]