He perches boldlyon the old phone wiredown Canning Factory Road. He sings killy killy killya violent tune for a falconpainted in colbalt and rust. Sir Toby once disparaged the stanielas an inferior sparrowhawk. Yet here,head down, the wind-hover enchants his prey. Voles scamper into the marsh grass.Young hares cower.I admire his beauty, murder be damned. Marjorie Gowdy writes and paints on her farm at the foot of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Over a long career, she has written essays, poems, short stories, and is working on a historical novel. She … Continue reading The Kestrel Blues by Marjorie Gowdy→
Human Entanglement After they split the atom, broke our water into hydrogen, and hydrogen, and the oxygen you couldn’t breathe, we and the hydrogen wandered the universe, searching for oxygen for what you were before the water broke, swept you down the river through the rocks over the steep glide of waterfall—the dam that stopped us for that moment, before we knew what it meant to become an ocean of loss. I have to believe in the physics of love: that if two particles—quantums, atoms, humans—become entangled, simply observing one will change the other, instantly, … Continue reading Human Entanglement and Woman, Falling, 2 poems by Karl Meade→
wondering at marriage; at what it’s really like and what it does to you – like: I know that I do love her but will it dislocate my bones? marriage – what then is the piston? what engine drives my father? who will I try to impress? it must be like a headcold – like giving up one of your senses. now it’s summer – I’m single – I walk and see women – temptation still blooms with the red sweating stamin of tropical flowers year round the botanical hothouse. and sometimes wearing clothes … Continue reading The hothouse by D S Maolalai→
“The deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.” —Jane Hirschfield, “Standing Deer” And this is how it is when I see the two-point, forty feet away, straight down the sidewalk, poised and watchful. And because it’s a blessing, I move to the other side of the road in order not to spook him, to startle him out of my sphere of awareness, because I want the blessing to last, this vision of the unexpected and its mysterious presence here in the summer dusk, having crossed the barrier between the mundane world I walk in … Continue reading A Block Off Henderson by Chris Dahl→
My teacher wife says that one learns by teaching. Of course, a good teacher must have mastery over the material to be taught. Another step of this ‘how-to’ of teaching is in preparing the method of communicating the material to the student(s). Process is a large part of teaching, or any craft for that matter. Better teachers are those whose process is engaging, even compelling, regardless of the challenging part. And a good teacher learns what accomplishes this engagement, what interests the students, how they learn. Unfortunately, the public-school curriculum is now dictated by state … Continue reading Interests of Old by Fred Wilbur→
I write in an accent interposed by war school closure, hunger and starvation. I write in an accent interposed by the absence of my father, the word that I stutter to utter due to the vague memory imposed by time despite the good things said about him. I write in an accent interposed by my mother’s many attempts to wrap her arms around the eight of us the way a hen would spread her wings to protect her chicks from the hawk. I write with an accent interposed By the stay-at-home policy of the … Continue reading Accent by Abraham Kedong Ali→
I read in the paper today was the birthday of the artist Jasper Johns, 95. I didn’t realize he was still alive. I remember him from Art History classes fifty years ago in college, his works on display at the BMA. This sometimes happens, an actor or a singer I’d assumed dead shows up in a story in the newspaper, very much alive. And yet I often dream one or the other of my deceased brothers is still living, often a dream about an argument we’re having, and when I wake up, I’m still … Continue reading Jasper Johns by Charles Rummelkamp→
Genius of oval, ovum, overlap capable of great feats, holding back the waterfall of too much cleavage or in my case, too vast a high plain of a post-mastectomy chest, thanks to this duchess of metal modesty protecting glamour girls and plain ones. Eagle landing to save the day and a nylon bag from spilling dozens of caramels in the gutter. Savior of a million opening nights everywhere from Broadway to small town high school renditions of The Music Man or Rent. Grandmother of agility in pink or blue bent on putting the safe … Continue reading Ode to a Safety Pin by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg→
Twenty five hundred years ago, the Buddha propounded (among other ideas) that nothing in existence is permanent. Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin” narrows this aspect of reality to a sociopolitical context. In the first instance, realization and acceptance is advised, while the second is an admonishment and a call for changes in attitude and for action as did Henry David Thoreau and others before him. A little more than a month ago when the country changed its clocks to Daylight Savings Time (DST) (on March 8, 2026), I began contemplating how we record … Continue reading Darkness Over America by Fred Wilbur→
At age five, after my country doctor grandfather dies, fascinated by the black-and-white photos in his discarded depression-era medical books stacked in a corner of the barn, I study at length, extra carefully, one picture of a man with not only bulging gray lumps on his neck and chest, but also a black rectangle covering his eyes. Why was it put there? Holding my hands over my eyes, trying to imagine what it is like to have a disfigured body, hearing rumbles and pings merging and building to a kettle drum crescendo as rain … Continue reading It’s Raining by Ben Sloan→
Streetlight Magazine is the non-profit home for unpublished fiction, poetry, essays, and art that inspires. Submit your work today!
