Apparently, during the fifteen or so minutes while my husband and daughter waited in the car outside Whole Foods, some man had knifed his ex-wife. The injury doesn’t seem serious; she’s slouched in the rea […]

My selected photographs belong to two different periods and locations but stem from similar motivations. They are studies, each leading to the next image, knowing that images birth one another. They are all […]

Ten years after my second divorce and one year sober, dreaming of companionable days and zooming up to a net worth of zero, Charlie asked me to marry him and I said yes.

It was an act of reckless selfishness. I […]

Somewhere in Arizona
 
dusk swallowed the day
we spent in gold-red dirt
tracing rocks with unsteady feet
where each thin-air breath
seemed as tentative as tomorrow.

So we slowed our pace, you and I,
we […]

In my own personal experience, art, poetry especially, has always been political, has always been protest, rooted in my own mixed ethnic and poverty-class background.

It rose from my father’s Irishness—Dad r […]

The Workers of Macchu Picchu
—After Neruda
Like corn, the mortals were husked in the bottomless
granary of forgotten deeds, miserable events,
from one o’clock to seven, to eight,
and not one but many dea […]

Dear Dhriti,

You’re 4 months old now and have learned how to lie on your stomach and roll over again. You’re reaching for teethers and toys, your mom proudly declares when I badger her for baby deet […]

[the roots have risen up away from the trunk]
 
i told my children the roots have risen up away from the trunk and like your brain seeps the tree’s structure seeps as well and searches and keeps searching ev […]

Late on a warm summer night in 1979, my housemate Lenny and I were shooting the breeze at the kitchen table when we heard a long squeal, followed by some loud bangs, interspersed with another squeal and, finally, […]

“To me photography is a blend of serendipity, of good fortune and conscious selection and structuring. I need to apply skill and I need to get lucky,” says Charlottesville photographer Will Kerner. “The […]

The old woman fills her days volunteering for a Catholic garden club planting flowers in vacant lots on the town’s east side, where at night gangs shoot it out amid trampled pansies and broken-off cosmos. She g […]

In the Valley of the Bones
The hand of HASHEM was upon me; it took me out by the spirit of HASHEM and set me down in the midst of the valley—and it was filled with bones…He said to me, “Prophesy over these bon […]

Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. We are not handed a guide at birth entitled Fail-proof Steps to Living This Life. As such, I’ve lived most of my life through a lot of trial and error—heavy on the er […]

Impostor
 
I am in the dirt and the dirt is in me
I am the flow of me recently

From the valley insignia clay came I
From the mountain foot crust came I

Am I the son of two righteous souls?
Am I not the […]

2017 was an amazing year for Streetlight Magazine owing to the excellent content submitted by writers and poets from all over the world. Our editors chose six nominees for The Pushcart Prize (best of small […]

A white pigeon sat in the gutter, waiting. Her wings were folded up like sails of a ship at anchor, her head bobbing in a sea of cobblestones. Slobodanka stopped, crouched down and peered into the bird’s brown a […]

(Unless otherwise noted, all paintings are watercolor/mixed media on hand-felted wool and rice paper.)

I am kind of an image junkie, especially images of the subconscious or […]

Still Life
 
In the painting Ram’s Head with Hollyhock
there is a melding of bones and sky
and desert, no beginning or end,
just the eye sockets of a skull
transfixed on the faraway
and in the fo […]

Mopsy, our beloved cat of mixed origins and numerous partners, had just had another litter of kittens—this time only four. She had amazed us the previous two times with six, all beautiful and now in good h […]

Last week was a mess! Well, at least that’s what I’ve been told. In my purpose-coaching practice, I had four clients in a row who used the word “mess” to describe their life these days. One client said, “becaus […]