I stared at the thick frosting of the cake, dotted with rainbow sprinkles, wondering if this would be what made him sick. I’d messed up the recipe, not realizing that “pasteurized egg whites” were different from just regular eggs that you took the yolks out of. So, the buttercream frosting included a decent amount of raw eggs. I’d already spent every day since his birth worried he would get sick. Today, on his first birthday, I worried the cake would be the reason. When you’re born in a pandemic, death seems as likely as life. … Continue reading From One March to Another: My NICU Baby and the Pandemic Turned One by Jamie Farnsworth Finn→
*Certain conditions apply. Statement is not an indicator of future performance, nor does it constitute any promise, guarantee or warranty. Cannot be combined with other offers. Void where prohibited. Howard Algeo has been published in the online editions of Crack the Spine and Paper Darts. He is a home health care executive, currently serving as Director of Business Development and Training for Seniors Helping Seniors. Howard holds a BA from Temple University and an MBA from the University of Michigan. Also a stand-up comedian, Howard feels writing comedy and writing poetry are very similar: It’s … Continue reading I Love You* by Howard Algeo→
This is a true story. After my husband Billy died in June of 2020, his ‘step daughter’ Zoe, a beautiful and vivacious woman of fifty offered her home in Santa Barbara to hold his memorial. We waited until the 2021 vaccines and chose the month of August. Zoe’s mother had been Billy’s girlfriend in the Seventies, and she and Zoe lived with Billy in Hollywood. Zoe’s mother and Billy never married. Zoe would laugh and refer to herself as the ‘step-daughter’ and make quotation marks in the air. While our daughter Tempe and son Charlie … Continue reading Once Upon a Time In Montecito by Trudy Hale→
She was a day past presence, riding the jagged breath below the surface of consciousness, and I was running to make the next plane to Arkansas. My footsteps parted the ear-splitting everyday announcements on the static speaker of gate changes and baggage claim. I was running, gunning the rental car through the curved roads of the Ozarks, frantic for her to hear the familiar cadence of my voice. She was inside her last flickering, the holding place just beneath the skin papered over bone. Her skull was a half-empty wasp nest, a grave tempo of … Continue reading Husk by Ellis Elliott→
One of the most surprising things I’ve discovered about writing is that while putting words on the page can be a solitary act, “being a writer” can’t be. Mind The Gap There is a gap between what people think the writing journey looks like, and what it really looks like. Non-writers picture you, alone in a book-lined room, dashing off deathless prose from Once Upon a Time to The End, occasionally gazing moodily into the distance as you wrestle with a creative demon, but ultimately in charge of your story all the way. Even … Continue reading Don’t Walk the Writers’ Path Alone by Julie Duffy→
“I’m going to tweet about this, and I need every single English-speaking celebrity on the planet to retweet my tweet. This is monstrous.” We are stopped at a red light. Devon, my husband of ten years, looks at me indulgently and says, “Good luck with that. Also, not sure monstrous is the right word here.” I emit a low growl. “People have seriously got to stop butchering the English language. I’ve already written the tweet in my mind. Listen.” Devon makes his fake “deep-thinking” face, causing me to roll my eyes. “Actual meaning of … Continue reading Word Play by Colette Parris→
Michael Snyder has traveled the world, camera in hand, documenting the stories of those concerned with environmental change and sustainability and the spaces they inhabit. “I want to be very intentional about my work and do more than make more than pretty photos. My why underneath these images is to contribute to the conversations we need to be having about what it means to live well on this planet without destroying it,” says Snyder, an award winning photographer/filmmaker, and resident artist at the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville. Having learned photography from his … Continue reading The Faces of Change by Michael O. Snyder→
Even though see saws are a thing of the past. I’ll return to a warm June evening when my brother and I have walked to the local elementary school. We seat ourselves on opposite ends, hold onto the metal handles and rise and descend, one in the air, the other on the ground, small craters where children before us have done the same with their feet. We pull out tangerines we’ve stashed in our windbreakers, peel them in unison, one of us suspending the other, trusting a smooth descent. Years later, on an interstate, … Continue reading How to Weigh Loss by Charlotte Matthews→
I am in the middle of writing an essay that spans a full twenty-nine of my thirty-two years of life. It hinges on an event that happened three Thanksgivings ago, but reaches as far back as my third birthday and as far forward as—well—now. And it is here, half-way through the writing of this essay (which is as heavy in terms of my emotional investment as it is long in word count), that I pause, close my laptop, and momentarily step away. Last week, I read a piece of the essay to my beloved writing … Continue reading Writing in Retrospect by Dana Mich→
Carole Duff has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Essay/Memoir Contest “I love a piano, I love a piano, I love to hear somebody play . . .” From Irving Berlin’s Stop! Look! Listen! Soon after moving into our first house, my husband and I purchased a piano. It was a Belarus reproduction of a Yamaha upright with a shiny, red-brown acrylic finish. One of my husband’s university colleagues knew a Russian musician and piano tuner who knew an immigrant couple who wanted to sell their piano. In the late 70s, they were … Continue reading The Piano Lesson by Carole Duff→
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