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 […]

Smoke
 
When it’s almost too dark to see,
my uncle sits out on the back porch,

rolling a cigarette, holding it up
to his mouth for the lick.

He’s trying to remember a boy
from the next farm […]

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“The houses that were lost forever continue to live on in us…they insist in us in order to live again, as though they expected us to give them a supplement of living.”*

I liked to throw a base […]

I started to become a writer with the first writing exercise I was ever given. I was 12. Mrs. A, my seventh-grade teacher, called it a ‟theme.” She said a theme should have a title, like ‟I Like Horses,” and the […]

Within just a few months living in New York’s Hudson Valley, we stopped buying our eggs anywhere but Sawkill Farm down the road. “Your eggs are better than anyone’s,” I told Kallie who runs the store and who mov […]

Most things, no matter how trite and mundane, have intrinsic beauty or interest when presented in just the proper way. This is the core premise underlying Forensic Foraging, an alternative technique for […]

The Return of the Woolly Mammoth
 
You rarely wore it,
though you yourself chose the color, midnight blue,
and knee-length cut. In derision, you named it
“the woolly mammoth,” pointing to its Pleistocene prop […]

Discussion about multiculturalism can have a polarizing effect on people and it often slides into train wreck conversations or initiates a war of words. People tend to pick sides based on affiliation and then […]

Heaven and Earth

Off the coast of the continent stars pinprick a black sky—tiny and plentiful, a cloud of a luminous multitude—announcement of lives, flows of history that date to creation and reach to unc […]

Recently, I participated in a group public reading of poetry at Richmond Public Library in Richmond, Virginia: Memento Mori: 26 poets responding to mortality, impermanence and grief, curated by Leslie Shiel and […]

As Briefly as Salmon
 
clouds part
we drive on rain-slicks of light

cars before us
trailing little rainbows

in tire sprays
fountains from the road

up the shoreline
under the shadow of rain

we […]