Artists Chica Tenney and Robert Bricker
Streetlight’s second issue features the work of Virginia artists Chica Tenney and Robert Bricker. Tenney, a painter and multi-medium artist, and Bricker, a sculptor, […]

Self Check-out
 
Of course I have my doubts,
but when no one’s looking
I pretend I’m someone else:
the tightrope walker, The Great Farini,
crossing Niagara Falls with a man on my back.
Or the veiled beek […]

Teresa Lewis
 
They are raising amnesty
signs along the courthouse road
portraits with her missing
lateral incisor filled in
perhaps to make her look
more like themselves
perhaps taking back
the […]

Sunday School
 
Here’s what I’m thinking:
Why does a duck need an ark?
What’s a flood to a duck?

The teacher says I ask
too many questions.
I raise my hand again, thinking

if we didn’t have teachers […]

Rehearsal
 
The best thing about the house
I grew up in was that it sat at the edge
of a small weedy lake
where my mother and I would row
to a raft through a thick tangle
of water lilies, their white cups […]

“Mommy, do trees grow up out of the ground,” Waffles says, “or do they grow from the top up?”

“I don’t know,” Isabelle says to her daughter. Then Isabelle takes a stab in the dark and says, “From the top […]

Dame Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was a serious student of Platonic idealism, in addition to being a highly successful novelist. Her exploits as scholar and philosopher – she was fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford – […]

In contrast to my subject matter, I will try to be brief: I don’t have any long range studies to back this up, but I think communication is getting, in general, faster and briefer. I have anecdotal evidence […]

A couple of weeks ago I discovered the original “Twilight Zone” series was available on Netflix Instant. Needless to say I have (happily) surrendered hours of my life re-watching this classic series, which I […]

In my twenties I thought of language as a bridge, not from one place to another, but above an abyss. The damnation waiting below was ordinary chaos, the dissonant march of hours, the rush of unsorted, simultaneous […]

[frame align=”right”][/frame]In 2006, Farrar Straus and Giroux published Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox, a medley of previously uncollected work by Elizabeth Bishop (edited by Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The […]

Maybe it’s the Blue Ridge Mountains. Maybe it’s the red clay, rolling pastures, horse farms, holsteins and herefords. Of course, it could be Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village.

Whatever the lure, Charl […]

Taken at face value, writing is a bit of an odd enterprise: Writers work alone, spending inordinate amounts of time and energy on something with absolutely no guarantee of success. In fact, the whole endeavor s […]

I Revise
 
I revise because images,
like moth wings,
grow, hidden in secret shrouds,

because the sun
never stops seeking
an oak in every acorn,

because milkweed,
beautiful in bloom
offers […]

Letterpress, Bangor
 
I, too, discern it: an impression of the impression
left on leaves, the broadside’s bite, an invitation
through the mail in a bygone, backhanded braille.
The leaden shadows that hide th […]

A Tomato, Like Love,
 
starts small, a fuzzy flimsy seedling
sneaky worms would secretly undercut.

You could almost miss its yellowish blossom
that becomes a fruit, hard and green at first,

slowly […]

Popillia Japonica
 
For rows of sun-buttered, glistening corn, red and green trimmed vines of
tomatoes
wrapping themselves around silvery rusted poles, thick fields of gummy
blooming tobacco,
tangled […]

“Back in the 90’s I fabricated a painting tool, somewhat like a squeegee, that could produce an image that appeared three-dimensional. Uprising and Powers of Ten are two paintings from that series. As mo […]

“I stumbled off the track to success in 1968, started chasing shadows that summer. Since then, in addition to farm-laborer and newspaper photographer, my occupational incarnations include d […]

It was November when the turkeys came to Ridge Hill Road. Before that, there was nothing remarkable about it—just a few shingled houses that squiggled through the scrub oaks like a dropped thread. All of the p […]