I remember that day in sixth grade at Gap Elementary School with painful clarity. Mrs. Groff turned from the board where she had written in her careful cursive the names of the countries involved in The […]

The heavy, punishing rains have stopped for now, and I step out onto the sun-warmed deck facing our back yard. A third of the space is now a lake, and in the center of this six-inch deep water stand our bird […]

A while ago I went with one of my nieces to get matching semicolon tattoos. This was remarkable for a variety of reasons:

1. I was 56.

2. Years before, when my eldest daughter came home from college […]

My Grandfather’s Garage, 1966
 
Steel licenses, galvanized,
nailed to the wall, black Virginia
plates, rusted and dented,

years spanning a life
on this farm, his World War,
to the second, his so […]

As a retired college English professor, I much enjoy editing manuscripts part-time. Clients find me via a University of Virginia website called Professors as Writers, a service intended for UVA faculty and grad […]

Did she touch you like that, with a little more than love, a little more hurt than you want? Did you see the pain in the dulled eyes; hear the shame in her slurred words? Did you know the room was not […]

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 […]