On the black and white TV, we watched silently, as an American soldier fell into a field of static like he was falling fast asleep, tumbling down the screen, out of sync with the signal, dropping one horizontal line at a time. Then, someone’s daughter came running out to us with her arms raised. They called her the Little Napalm Girl because she burned with Napalm’s invisible fire. She looked to be exactly my age at the time, caught on the camera in this first war, televised. My dad didn’t want me to see her, … Continue reading Little Napalm Girl by Jean Mikhail→
We write for a target audience. Readers differ in their demographics as well as their literary tastes. When my novel, Never, was published, I began meeting with book groups, and they were all baby boomers like me. I realized I’d written a book for my own generation. Never is a coming-of-age story that takes place in the segregated south. Folks my age (I’m turning seventy) can remember Martin Luther King and the turbulent sixties. Southern readers have shared with me their memories of growing up with a Black maid, often articulating a version of the bewildered … Continue reading Writing For A Generation by Joel F. Johnson→
What Horses Say What’s to be made of the field of buttercups, a saffron sea at the bend of the road, with the three horses ….one black with white mane and tail …one coppered like a new penny ….one white as an angel a triumvirate of muscled peace and perfection. What’s to be made of thinking of 3 recently dead friends every single time I drive past the most laughably maudlin reach for meaning when the real story is simple: Time is real- the realest unseen thing undocumented, untouchable a mystery deeper than … Continue reading What Horses Say and Stains, 2 poems by Rita Quillen→
Jeanne Malmgren is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest This should be a quick in-and-out, I’m thinking. As we walk into the Department of Motor Vehicles, I’m cheered to see the line isn’t too long. We’re here for a simple errand, to change our driver’s licenses from Florida to South Carolina. It’s as mundane as any of the other chores related to moving to a new state. This DMV office is home turf for me. It’s just down the road from the country hospital where I was born. This is the … Continue reading Blindsided by Jeanne Malmgren→
The one and only time I put a knife in my pocket heading out to church was on Sunday, December 13, 1981. My mother, a single parent, was working a night shift, and my job at age eleven, in a true latchkey-kid fashion, was to get myself and my seven-year-old sister to holy mass. That was far from unusual. I was in charge on most Sunday mornings at that age. I’d usually wake up early, turn on channel one (of two), and watch cartoons for a few minutes before anything else. That morning, instead … Continue reading Writing Through Autocracy by Karol Lagodzki→
It was a flat grey stone, the kind you found in tourist shops, with pre-set words. What a strange gift from Andrea, I’d thought, and plunked it into my pocket—carelessly. Only later, I found my hand often curving around it, feeling its weight, its contours. Where was she now? All those nights I found myself awake, throwing on some clothes. Inside my car, I cruised through the dead-quiet night streets. Sometimes, the streetlights, or the cold probing lights left on in closed stores, allowed me a glimpse of a huddled shape under a doorway, or … Continue reading A Stone by Debbie Bennett→
This is the light of stillness after everything has been said and thought, after the day has been brought to its knees once more, after the excuses, the bargainings with self, conversations that started so hopefully, but stopped. Don’t expect the darkened maple to turn over a bright leaf, find its own breeze. What pours in through the blinds is unmoved as the numb paw of your hand half opened or closed on the snow bank pillow, cold as the truth of its sleep. Let that radiance lift me weightless, timeless, into its night, and … Continue reading Moonlight by Ronald Stottlemyer→
At three, Brooke Major picked up a paint brush and rode her first horse. Her path was set. “My grandfather had riding stables and I fell in love with horses as a young child in Clayton, a small town in the North Georgia mountains,” Major remembers. She started riding frequently, and by six, she had her first pony and began jumping lessons in Buckhead, a suburb of Atlanta. “As for painting, the passion started at the age of three when I drew on absolutely everything I could find, most of the time … Continue reading The Sculpted Paintings of Brooke Major→
If ‘silence is golden,’ why do we squander it so foolishly? If you try finding ‘peace and quiet’ in contemporary life, you will be gob-smacked to encounter it. We praise the sounds of nature: babbling brooks, whispering leaves, bird song. And granted, there are buzzing mosquitos and growling bears, but it has been shown that humans need the restorative powers of the outdoors. When nature takes a destructive turn, we anthropomorphize its “nasty: weather, “raging” floods or describe (the sound of) tornadoes as a fast approaching freight train. Which brings us to the notion … Continue reading The Dying Art of Silence? by Fred Wilbur→
In a dark subway tunnel between stations, a concave safety niche holds a grotto of graffiti unseen unless you happen to glance out when the train lights hit it. The moment you notice its radiance you’re past it, though if you close your eyes a vision of its brash vision remains. Someone braved the trains and third rail and cops to spray what graffiti artists call, considering the danger involved, a Heaven Spot. A Heaven Spot that tags you— in your own private grotto— like a dangerous dream. Mark Belair’s poems have appeared in numerous … Continue reading Heaven Spot by Mark Belair→
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