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 […]

Remain calm.

You have purchased the crème de la crème of packages; don’t squander the experience with a panic attack. So bridges make you sweat. So you chew three Xanax every time you board a plane. So […]

When my children were learning to talk, I developed a fascination with language acquisition. The process of learning to communicate with other human beings in the lingua franca of the culture (speaking US English […]

Eel River Meditation
 
Above the Eel River,
a concrete bridge: every summer
we plied humid afternoons
with hickory bark canoes.

Lying on the sloped bank
we paddled between
walnuts and hickories—
we we […]