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 […]

I didn’t know exactly where we were going as my brother took me for a ride in the countryside of my home county on a late February Saturday. He drove down a narrow paved road and stopped near an overgrowth of t […]

I wander through urban places, mostly near my home in Brooklyn, New York, rolling a Whole Foods cart jammed with a collapsible chair, a bristol pad, pencils, pastels, an easel and canvases. I make i […]

I Have
 
I have never been so tired in my whole life.
The mountains run across
the river—pointing
like a knife. Forlorn
boathouses perched out on rotting piers.
Empty lots of naked scrub.
A water to […]

“Old age ain’t no place for sissies,” the actress Bette Davis famously said, and these words reeled through Muffin’s head as she crammed a pill pocket down the throat of her ancient basset hound. Ernesti […]

Rich H. Kenney, Jr. is the 3rd place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2017 Essay/Memoir contest.

In the summer of 1960, my father got high and I held the ladder. “All you have to do,” he told me, “is […]

At 7:40am, the streets of downtown Charlottesville are eerily quiet. If not for the barricades, it would be hard to believe these streets will soon teem with people: busloads of Nazis come for the Unite the Right […]

My second novel, Best Intentions, is a medical thriller that falls solidly between Write-What-You-Know, a form of untaxing research I heartily recommend, and Write-What-You-Worry-About, a selfless act of spreading […]