The worms are writing a song in my garden, rustling their slick bodies through the leaves in a rising crescendo, inspired by the rain. If one were musically inclined, they could accompany these worms but only softly, because if you’re too loud, you’ll scare them and they’ll stop. They like flutes. They don’t like cellos. The worms hear my footsteps across the yard and grow silent just as I approach pick up their song again with verve and zest in the wake of my passing. If I were musically inclined, I’m sure I could pace … Continue reading The Audience Beneath by Holly Day→
If you want a free lunch, All you have to do is smash, bleed, and work for it. Would you like some peanuts for lunch? Free sample, the sign on the wooden box says. Take one. Inside the box with the sign, behind the broken glass holding them in place, the peanuts lie stacked, delicately pressed and balanced against the edge ready to tumble on the first move. To eat them, you must first smash the glass, and hope your hands don’t bleed. Disturb the system, and hope none cascade onto the floor, so that … Continue reading Trick of the Eye: Fresh Roasted by Richard Elliott Martin→
Teaching, too, is labor. Everyday to be up to the task, everyday the master of a hundred worlds, of casual words, and of causal words, to confront the faces added to or taken from. Do you know when you add a thought there, it shows in the eyes, it shows in the mouth’s subtle creases? Do you know, when you stop a thought, when you turn it aside with a straight line, with the shortest distance from there to here, it shows in the brow’s labor? Exhaustion. Do you know that teaching is exhaustion, everyday … Continue reading Teaching by J.R. Solonche→
“It is true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.” —George Orwell “Why I Write” (1947) Several months ago (23 September 2024) Miles Fowler wrote a Street Talk blog titled “The Thinly Disguised Autobiography” which provoked me to reflect on this “courageous or foolhardy” activity. Naturally, many writers entertain the notion of writing about themselves; personal experience being a writer’s primary resource. Autobiography differs from biography in that the author is still alive! I say this flippantly as biography can be of a person alive … Continue reading A Bragging Humility by Fred Wilbur→
Tucked in her shell of gutsy metal, an errant art teacher spun my car into a snow bank. We shook after the collision, the grab handle, Jesus, pried loose, sun visor dangling like a hangnail from the inside roof. The glovebox archives our road lives, talismen from preschool classes, cassette tapes and their magnetic cellophanes spooling loose, expired disability placards lodged behind the tissue packets. The passenger side door was crinkled, discarded- candy-wrapper-style, and the back of my head felt like mayhem and grind. She didn’t see me turning right, despite my right of way, … Continue reading First Car Accident by Alisha Goldblatt→
The lilacs hid the remains of a porch it used to screen. The hints of joints and steps leading up and between. Stone remnants of a foundation, a house that used to be stolid and presentable to the world. Flush with flowers, the branches bending low, bowing under their weight, I waited, too, shifting my own meager childish weight, from one foot to the other, sifting through those parts of me solid and true, walled in by my imagination, as white-washed walls rose back into view. The air heavy with its perfume. My head … Continue reading Jack Gilbert Keeps Lilacs Alive in his Head by Deborah Doolittle→
They’re up on the branch tips, all eight legs en pointe— one hundred and four chitinous arachnids, their tutus matching leafless twigs. These spiders parse every gust, like surfers scoping wind and swell; desirous wind, wind strong and constant, like the hot custard disc of June. When it blows faithful, they hoist their buttocks, as if spiders actually had buttocks, shooting life-lines of silk into wind—wind, now a sculptor’s hands, patting and twirling the silklines into a sail, or is it a parachute; aeronauts lifting into the air as if west was the only … Continue reading When the Spring Winds are Strong, Wolf Spiders Balloon by Gary Grossman→
This year my credit card company sent me a birthday card. In simple red, white and blue it wished me a happy birthday from Credit One. It is nice of my credit card to put the effort in to send a physical card when an email would have done it. My mom sent a text. My credit card puts the work in. It knows how to rupture and repair. It gives double miles at thousands of convenient locations all over the world. My credit card is senpai Uwu. I’ll never have to ask for it … Continue reading Maxed Out by Jason Montgomery→
“If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.” —Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle Autumn is usually a time for renewed outdoor activity as usually summer heat and humidity subside. But usually has become a problematic qualifier. It seems that nothing in nature, in politics, in religion, or in human culture can be counted on to give us reassurance that “all’s right with the world.” My wife and I traveled recently to Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Fallingwater;” an outing which … Continue reading Water, Water, Everywhere: Lessons of Water by Fred Wilbur→
Deborrah Corr has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest The red onion is a purple globe. I hold it, let my skin adore its slick, smooth contours. Then I bear down with a knife. A slice reveals a maze. No, I’ve misspoken. I’m mistaken. There are no passages with doorways through which you wander, puzzled how to get to the center and find your way back again. Just white corridors, inescapable layers, lined in lilac. Rotating, arriving always where you started. I begin to think monotony. I think hospital hallways, blank anxiety. … Continue reading The red onion by Deborrah Corr→
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