Full Snow Moon Fat and slow, she climbs the eastern sky like an old woman climbs stairs, holding onto tree branches and stars to make her way to February’s zenith. She rises on time, a beacon fully seen. A passing comet with a green head tips his hat and is gone. Look. The Sea of Tranquility is next to the Sea of Crises. Wolves howl, but she persists. Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has been a Pushcart Prize nominee. Author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real … Continue reading Full Snow Moon by Joan Mazza→
Thank you to Trudy Hale and the Streetlight Magazine editors for choosing me to be your new poetry editor. I’m excited and grateful to be part of this ever developing and stimulating home for “exceptional talent, both new and established.” As I begin reviewing the poetry submissions we receive, I see several which come very close, but are not quite ready for publication. I can’t help but imagine that poets and writers and readers of Streetlight Magazine are wondering, “Who is she?” and “What is she looking for in my poems?” Poetry in which the … Continue reading What is She Looking For?→
Before there were Google maps, cable travel channels and live streaming from every corner of the Internet, there were slides, those posh cousins of snapshots. The tiny film inside a cardboard frame only reveals itself through projection on a white screen in a dark room, lending a kind of drama and mystery to each shot. In my home, putting up the screen and watching a round of slides was an important occasion. So important that my parents invited friends over for cocktails before regaling them with a slide show of, say, Pompeii, or Rome. You … Continue reading Into a Sliding World by Jane Bradley→
I was standing in the stacks of the Sutro Library in San Francisco, following a lead on a case I was working. I was not a private detective, but I had aspirations to be one, and my sister-in-law wanted me to find a college classmate whom she had lost touch with, I guess, the minute they had graduated. And she was willing to pay me to find her friend. I offered to do it for free, but she knew that her sister and I were not doing that well, and, besides, my sister-in-law was a … Continue reading My (Almost) Fling With Private Investigation by Miles Fowler→
I understood the world around me on Promise Road. I felt at home on the edge of the rolling valley, looking out at the distant mountain range. I learned to fight creeping Charlie, pigweed and cheat grass with soil enhancement, rotational grazing and early weeding. I recognized the arrival of summer as the swallows began daubing their mud nests above my windows, swooping through the evening sky to clear the air of mosquitos. I named the bats that flew in my open doors on warm summer evenings, searching corners and hallways for moths. Over time, … Continue reading Leaving Promise Road by Amelia Zahm→
I talk to dead people. Oh, don’t get worried. It’s not like they talk back. Although, there was that time… What I’m saying is that I have some graves that are my favorite haunts. (And just to be absolutely clear—it’s me that’s doing the haunting.) My grandmother’s for one. But also David’s, because my grandmother is several hours away. David, the firefighter and preacher. As his assigned mentor in the ministry, I spent a lot of hours with him. I also helped with his funeral five years ago after he was thrown from the vehicle … Continue reading On Talking to the Dead→
In a northern portion of the Midwest, on a night of light snow, during the few minutes just before and after ten o’clock, some things happened. They occurred along a route on which a southbound train traveled through fields that bracketed a town. The train carried few passengers. The conductor sat in the back of a nearly empty car working on a crossword puzzle. He was having trouble thinking of a six-letter word for “spotted, mottled, multi-colored”. He looked outside where the wisps of snow blew sideways in the darkness, but found himself staring at … Continue reading Calico Cat by William Cass→
Agnostic In the bath a spider crawls along the ledge. It’s tiny enough that it doesn’t scare this arachnophobe. Isn’t that the way fear works, the smaller the threat the less a reason to run? Unlike the huge, or maybe average wolf spider that cornered me in the kitchen. In a panic I reached for Easy Off, sprayed the hirsute carapace into an igloo of chemical foam. Drenched, seemingly undaunted, the fizzy white dome skittered across the linoleum toward me, and I fled, as if from Godzilla. But here in my tub this little … Continue reading Two Poems by Diane DeCillis→
Frankie Slaughter is a mixed media artist living in Richmond, Va. She works with a variety of materials including fabric, paper, encaustic and porcelain. She previously designed one-of-a-kind jackets, jewelry and accessories. I collect bits of papers from my travels and beyond: gold leaf funerary papers, old dress pattern papers, newspapers written in Hindi, Thai and Chinese, and notes and doodles from my sketchpads. Over 15 years of living in Hong Kong, I was drawn to the nuances of the culture: I learned basic Cantonese, traveled extensively, and collected beads and ethnic … Continue reading Full Circle – Recent Works by Frankie Slaughter→
The city’s Central district is different in the early morning, just after sunlight usually appears: near empty streets, no black skirt suits, few voices. Today, damp bundles just delivered to the newspaper vendors cover the sidewalk and tobacco smoke hovers heavily in a steady monsoon drizzle. My old dimming eyesight smooths out the vendors’ features—softer noses, subtler chins. Flaws fade into blurs. Down two flights of stairs, I descend into an almost empty Central Station, bathing in one of Mozart’s perky piano melodies. A human din will soon drown out the pleasant music. Hong … Continue reading Late-August Mass Transit Railway (MTR) by James Ellis→
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