He emerged from the bushes clutching a bottle of wine, his face whipped red by the wind. They were huddled together in the clearing. Dry tufts of winter grass poked through the ratty blanket on which they sat. […]

I wheel in beside the beige Buick. Ten years ago Mama had claimed its parking space twenty feet below her apartment balcony. From there she watches over her car—a proud reminder that she still has places to go, p […]

“Be an ant,” he says.

“Don’t look at the whole project at once and try to do it,” says my stone-steady, clear-eyed, logical-thinking husband. “Be an ant. Do what’s in front of you. Do this one thing, take t […]

Playing War with My Daughter
 
I stare at my half of the deck
thinking how this game is pure

luck, then of how luck is more than
itself, how it grows exponentially.

At this moment
much is on the […]

You Held My Hand And Walked Me Out Of The Water
 

Sometimes I look at the photos of my parents before they were sick to try and find clues of the diseases to come. There’s one of them courtside at a P […]

I was sitting at the bar in the My-Oh-My drinking what was left of my disability check after buying oxy from the retarded janitor at the hospital. The idea of killing someone hadn’t come up yet. I kept staring a […]

At some point—I’m not sure when—I came to accept that there are quite a few things that I can’t control. It was not a conscious decision, no epiphany, no wrestling with big ideas. It’s not really ceding control—i […]

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 […]