Common Stingray Dasyatis pastinaca In the infinite silence of her velvety skin, she roams through moon water at night, scours coastal shallows, glides around the Mediterranean, Norway, Canary Islands— fluid creature soaring, foraging chink snails, snapper biscuits, spiny shrimp, undulating in and out of waves. She is a wave— primordial, flexing spine and filament, overlapping, ruffling her flexible body— a pectoral fin disk, graceful as gull wings in watery air. Diamond-shaped, she resembles a stealth fighter, almost alien, yet magical— all flesh, fiber, cartilage, onyx eyes peering through sand when she buries herself in … Continue reading Common Stingray by Carol Was→
Freedom. Freedom to explore. Freedom to express one’s self. Freedom to communicate your conscience. Artist Robert Strini has been answering the call for over 40 years. “The biggest key in my life was when my father said to me, ‘I don’t care what you do or how much money you make, as long as you love what you do,’” says the son of a country Italian butcher who loved his trade. Strini’s father also took his young son to lectures on the power of positive thinking. His mother was a generous-hearted, hands-on homemaker. Given … Continue reading Freedom Works for Robert Strini→
I recognize that I may be a tad more sensitive to the prospect of police state behavior than the average Jo but I come by this extra helping of unease naturally. Because of his liberal politics my dad, Marcus Raskin, earned a permanent spot on J. Edgar Hoover’s radar. Bigly. Dad was the frequent object of surveillance and dirty tricks. (He even had his own covert agent assigned to him when he worked as an adviser in the White House—something I discovered in college when I accidentally dated a guy whose father was that agent.) … Continue reading Push Back, Breathe, Repeat: A Brief Bio by Erika Raskin→
They are called Quakers because the spirit, which is in all beings, begins to move and demands a voice. They quake where they sit, on their plain wooden benches, until that which is in their hearts is spoken aloud to the Meeting. Very often what they have to share is a question or a confirmation of the notion of peace and they stand to speak in the hopes of a self and a world free of violence. My parents joined a Friends Meeting when I was three years old. My younger brother and sister are … Continue reading Fuzzball and the Quakers by Lassiter Williams→
In his slightly madcap, secretly serious, mystery novel, I Shot the Buddha, Colin Cotterill, on the very first page, describes three types of “cinematic plot devices” that his protagonists find annoying: coincidences, which he labels as “coming in third,” behind first (or second?) convenient amnesia, and second (or first) the sudden appearance of an identical twin. Somehow my attention got snagged on that last (but possibly first) objection, sufficiently not to notice that he slyly went on to say, “but after all this was real life.” I was ready, as it were, to debate the … Continue reading The Sudden Appearance of an Identical Twin→
Blue It must have been her accent that seduced and baffled my ears. The Egyptian woman, still lost in the desert air of Cairo, read her poems filled with water from the Nile and blue heaven, blue heaven, blue heaven flying over the lotus flowers. I heard “heaven” but later discovered she said “heron.” A distant cousin to the sacred ibis, herons (even blue ones) are commonplace–are everywhere–even in the non-exotic marshes of northern Ohio where another blue creation–my mother– landed. Blue Helen, blue Helen, blue Helen. The kids in Cleveland would tease her. … Continue reading Blue by Linda Nemec Foster→
In my almost 80 years it seems as if I have lived numerous lives because the world has changed so swiftly under my feet. My world now as a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, pastor’s wife and poet could not be more wildly different than my first world as a child in the near wilderness of rural Michigan. But as crooked and wandering as the path was, those early days are instrumental to who I am now. The first house we lived in after moving to rural Michigan from Chicago in 1942 when I was … Continue reading A Vast Bloom of Light→
They arrived at the beach at dawn. The Family: Father, Mother, Son and Baby Girl. They enjoyed sole ownership of the beach, playing, swimming and napping as the tide rolled back. Morning settled in and they returned from their long swim to find they had neighbors, scattered far away but close enough to be acknowledged. The Family didn’t mind. There was plenty of room for everybody, they thought. However, as more people arrived, staking their plots of sand with umbrellas, tents, chairs and towels, the Family worried for a moment that they hadn’t brought … Continue reading Natives by Chuck Nwoke→
For most of my youth, I lived in a secure blanket of belonging. I belonged to the groups of people that surrounded me at my school and church: white Christians, married couples with children (children like me), and suburban homeowners. I learned from my parents and other adults who the “bad” people were. I knew that when adults lowered their voice to talk about somebody, it indicated disapproval. As a child, I could never have imagined that one day I would become the very person they were disparaging. Yet that’s exactly what I did. Since … Continue reading Open-Mic Poetry Night→
Streetlight Magazine is the non-profit home for unpublished fiction, poetry, essays, and art that inspires. Submit your work today!
