Pecking
 
A pigeon
pecking its tail clean
on a shady tenement fire escape

gives me
pause to feel, in its
twisting instinct, the fact of life

after death—
not an afterlife of mine, but of
its sp […]

Maybe Joan Söderlund’s mother was on to something.

“My mother wanted to keep me off my bicycle because I had broken a few bones. I think she thought, ‘If we get her into art and painting, it will ke […]

The Remains of Quanah Parker & Eagle Park

Follow Wayne Gipson down through the gate behind the trading post, past the concrete pad of the old amphitheater where Reba McIntire once appeared, and just behind the […]

In addition to being the second Monday in October—a month with, yikes, five Mondays in 2017—October 9 this year (and every so often) commemorates Columbus Day. Are you planning to celebrate? Or use the time off […]

I’m seven years old, and streams of people lean on the walls of the viewing room, standing in line for their turn to see my father in his coffin. I’m so close that the slippery gloss of the lacquered wood sli […]

I met Sharon one Saturday morning in late September at Writer House in Charlottesville, Virginia after dropping a writer off at the train station who had been at Porches writing retreat. We talked about Playing […]

Podcast: Marital and family duties constrict the life of a matriarch who contemplates change in her latter years.

A short story performed by Jennifer Sims.

Read the story online: Away by Juditha Dowd

Where I First Was Happy
 
The twilight was never silver, but the trees were Russian olives.
I was the only thing that bloomed there.
Grandma’s petunias back by the house were really white,
And the pair of […]

An essay on creative process by Rachel E. Diken

The Open Road had long been a solace to me, until a highway crash many years ago where faulty brakes caused a high-speed tumbling wreck. I was moving from the […]

I am floating in near total silence in the women’s bathhouse at the Jefferson Pools, a natural mineral springs in Bath County, Virginia. Surrounded by six other women, some nude, others in bathing suits, t […]

Poets and writers of fiction and nonfiction write with a sense of specific place in all languages. Once place is introduced in the piece, emotions are evoked, and a lot of things can happen in that place. In […]

Thirty-Three
 
The number of vertebrae in the human spine
when coccyx bones are counted individually.

The temperature at which water boils on the Newton
scale. In Fahrenheit, just above freezing.

It’s a […]

Bonnie took a toothpick and dug at her fire-eaten scalp. Fifteen more minutes. Her mama always loved Bonnie’s red curls. “Just as sweet as the bluebirds singing in the oaks,” Mama would whisper to her. “God […]

Streetlight art editor, Elizabeth Meade Howard, had her book Aging Famously: Follow Those You Admire to Living Long and Well published by Jefferson Park Press on September 10thth. Jane Barnes, author of Falling in […]

Flood
 
Small hands pull
a mud-stained pillowcase
across wet ground,
prized possessions,
blessings still bound,

boxes filled with
half-spilled lives,
lugged uphill.

Hear the river roar:
I take […]

I am but a mouthful of sweet air – W.B. Yeats

I take special pleasure in sitting outdoors. There’s displeasure, too, in the form of bugs and mercurial weather that I can’t control, but mostly I take pleas […]