Being disowned by your family is often an integral part of the queer experience. It’s a common story that I find is meticulously avoided in popular, escapist/pulp media—an effect of heterosexism that erases and d […]

Promontory
 
At the overlook, we could see four states
If the fog had not rested its elephantine
Rump upon the conifers. We can barely
See each other, much less the road
Switchbacking down the side of […]

A year after the car accident that orphaned Nick, the Bishops picked him up from his grandmother’s for a weekend at Fallen Tree Lake. Saddened by his circumstances, the financier and his wife had taken to […]

One evening, damp and full of anguish, I arrive at a camp and basically fall apart. I want to talk to my boyfriend back home, but as usual have no signal. I start climbing on soggy leaves, moving higher, hoping. […]

When I was a child, Moab terrain served as backdrop for macho trucks suddenly dwarfed like hood ornaments atop massive mesas, the sun blazing rays from which, within seconds, a Chevrolet logo would emerge.

In a […]

Write what you know.

That was the mantra when I was in graduate creative writing school. We were admonished to write from our own experience, not to try to reach beyond our boundaries and try to re-create […]

3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Poetry Contest

Patina
 
The things you forget are the stupid verbal confetti of old love letters,
the weight of ancient matters settling the scales of justice around yo […]

Jennifer Sutherland is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Poetry Contest
 
An Elegant Variation
One quiet Sunday we drove south on silver-leafed Charles Street,
ducked into one of the gingerbread wa […]

2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Poetry Contest

mi gemela

i can hear avocado
trees in the backyard,
the hum of abuela’s
sewing machine
in the kitchen.

the plastic chairs
poke the fat of our […]

I grew up telling it to whoever would listen—mostly that fell on my mother’s shoulders.

At the breakfast table, at the dinner table, I proselytized with the fervor of a repenting sinner. And it beg […]

Ingrid Jendrzejewski is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest

 
Mare’s tails and mackerel scales Make tall ships take in their sails.
She’s studied the weather and knows about […]

Emily Larkin is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest
‘I’ll have a shot of anxiety with mint, vanilla syrup, and crushed ice, and a pint of despair. With a lemon wedge […]

Julie Gesin is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2018 Flash Fiction Contest

It’s dark when he reaches home and opens the garden gate, shoulders vulnerable to the pulse of crickets that rattles the gar […]

As her life changed so did the patterns of her art.

“I love patterns…I surround myself with patterns,” says mixed media artist Judy McLeod, a Charlottesville resident for more than four decades. “Whe […]