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 […]

The day before Halloween 1967, I came home from school, turned on the television, and discovered the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows. All I saw was the episode’s final minute:

A beautiful blonde descends a […]

***Ashley Stimpson is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
 

You insist it’s okay to smoke in the rental car, that you’ve done it so many times and never had to pay a cleani […]

Private Wilson hesitated at the precipice. It felt like a long time since his Sargent had barked, “Wilson, GO! GO!” Technically, Wilson hadn’t heard it, the air rushing by the plane was moving by so quick […]

I began making photos, suddenly and unexpectedly, in 2005, when a dear friend was diagnosed with cancer. Making photos help me to fill temporal-spatial, psycho-social holes and, on rare good days, to […]

Malady
 
He’s never been sick before
skin warm and ill-fitting, moist as he sinks into me,
that exhausted root for comfort and the fear that
he’ll be declining soon.
Children know to seek this oath from thei […]

I had long been convinced that destiny had intended me to be born and bred in Italy. Instead, I grew up in suburban Chicago. In September 2008 I set out to rectify fate’s error. Together with my husband Bill and o […]

Risa Eccles, thirty-nine weeks pregnant, sat in her car, furious at Dr. LaSalle for being an asshole, at Paul for having the kind of job that made him seem like a degenerate, at herself for thinking that […]

***Anne Carson is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
Before my older sister outgrew me, outgrew our entire family’s chaos, we shared a bedroom. For a few years there, we were goo […]

Okay, maybe not exactly saved it, but at least shored it up.

Let me tell you how.

My husband and I married in the late 70’s, back when our generation was all about living simply, off the land and off the g […]

Charybdis and the River
 
Do you hear the gurgling river?
All the molecules of oxygen and hydrogen
in their special dance, choreographed,
washing memories clean,
liquid fingers wearing grooves
into the […]

Soundtrack 3 (1964)
It’s a cold February day. My parents and I are visiting Saint James School to decide if I will go there in the fall. I am in the ninth grade at Sligo Junior High School; I am lost there b […]

California Girls was the lyric that bumped the bass held together by a woman’s sweet, altered, voice that tasted like vanilla but left a burn like bottom shelf vodka; and Elsie Malabago loved to hear this s […]

***Heather Bartlett is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir Contest***
 

“Working for 24 hours straight is all about your perspective,” he says. “Your body can handle it. Human beings a […]

Congratulations to the winners of Streetlight’s 2018 Essay/Memoir contest! But first, a little whining.

Judging a contest is a lot of hard work (whine, whine). I hasten to say I don’t mean the reading of the […]

I Bought Them
 
I bought them,
two big books,
fat with two lifetimes of poems,

not so much to read them,
which, over a long time, as is meant, I will do,
but just to look at,

their bigness,
heavy as […]

I like games. I like cooperative, team-building games in particular.

Here is a game called Midnight Adventure that I played in competition with several teams:
A group of five people (my team) worked together […]