The Blue Room by Karen Kates

blue walled bedroom
 

Apparently, during the fifteen or so minutes while my husband and daughter waited in the car outside Whole Foods, some man had knifed his ex-wife. The injury doesn’t seem serious; she’s slouched in the rear of an open ambulance, where a paramedic presses a tiny bandage to her cheek. Still, I’m horrified: that blade could have reached her eye. I’m relieved to see my husband, Nathan, sitting up straight in the Volvo, and six-year-old Juliet, harnessed behind him, in that complicated plastic bucket of a seat. It’s bitter cold, sleeting. As I get into the … Continue reading The Blue Room by Karen Kates

The Photography of Fabrice Poussin


 

My selected photographs belong to two different periods and locations but stem from similar motivations. They are studies, each leading to the next image, knowing that images birth one another. They are all connected as, in reality, they are the inner life of the creator. As for the effect, I place the objects, or find the objects as they are. I try a number of angles, and lighting conditions so I am not necessarily sure of what the final product will be. I shoot hundreds of images of the same subjects as I move around … Continue reading The Photography of Fabrice Poussin

Life in the Big Woods by Martha Woodroof

View up, through trees, into sky
 

Ten years after my second divorce and one year sober, dreaming of companionable days and zooming up to a net worth of zero, Charlie asked me to marry him and I said yes. It was an act of reckless selfishness. I had no history of peaceful co-existence with a man; no demonstrated ability to function as part of a team, take things as they come à deux. But true love will rise up and conquer common sense even after forty, and one fine September day Charlie and I were married by Rappin’ Ray, minister of … Continue reading Life in the Big Woods by Martha Woodroof

Somewhere in Arizona by Marsha Owens

inside of Antelope Canyon sandstone formations
 

Somewhere in Arizona   dusk swallowed the day we spent in gold-red dirt tracing rocks with unsteady feet where each thin-air breath seemed as tentative as tomorrow. So we slowed our pace, you and I, we who brought our wounded selves to each other, paused to feel the earth’s arms around us when down in the clearing like a child’s painting splashed onto a concrete page, the doe took center stage—just a whisper, watery legs sufficient, her elegant head arced downward. She knew I watched. She didn’t care how I envied her vulnerable assurance and … Continue reading Somewhere in Arizona by Marsha Owens

Radical Reach: Thinking On Art as Activism by Mary Carroll-Hackett

Hands writing with a quill
 

In my own personal experience, art, poetry especially, has always been political, has always been protest, rooted in my own mixed ethnic and poverty-class background. It rose from my father’s Irishness—Dad reciting Yeats regularly, the earliest poetry of my memory, those lines documenting our family history in Easter 1916, the heartbreaking tales told round our table of “the troubles” and what they referred to not as a famine, but as ‘the Great Hunger.” It grew from my mother’s childhood in abject Appalachian poverty, the barbs I knew personally of class divisions, the broken Southern diction … Continue reading Radical Reach: Thinking On Art as Activism by Mary Carroll-Hackett

The Workers of Macchu Picchu by Stephen Massimilla

Macchu Pichu covered by clouds
 

The Workers of Macchu Picchu —After Neruda Like corn, the mortals were husked in the bottomless granary of forgotten deeds, miserable events, from one o’clock to seven, to eight, and not one but many deaths came to each: every day a small death—dust, worm, lamp snuffed in the slums of mud—a small thick-winged death entered each laborer like a short lance, and these men were driven by bread and by the knife, by the rancher, son of the seaports, dark captain of the plow, like rodents of overrun streets: all weakened waiting for their death, … Continue reading The Workers of Macchu Picchu by Stephen Massimilla

A Letter to My 4-Month Old-Niece by Shruti Ramanujam

miniature wooden boat on display
 

  Dear Dhriti, You’re 4 months old now and have learned how to lie on your stomach and roll over again. You’re reaching for teethers and toys, your mom proudly declares when I badger her for baby deets. She says this is fast, but all I want to scream is “Motor, you slowpoke!” Can’t you grow a little faster? Can’t you see that I’m waiting for you to start reading? I want to buy you your first book and hopefully, all the books in your future bookshelf. I’ll start you on fairytales and then bring … Continue reading A Letter to My 4-Month Old-Niece by Shruti Ramanujam

2 Poems by Darren Demaree

gnarled tree roots
 

[the roots have risen up away from the trunk]   i told my children the roots have risen up away from the trunk and like your brain seeps the tree’s structure seeps as well and searches and keeps searching even in the spring because the nourishment doesn’t come from the good black or the tall blue visiting it comes from growing until you bump your head on the ceiling until you are a giant in your own world and that will be the first part of your lives the second the third the fourth and … Continue reading 2 Poems by Darren Demaree

A Late Night Scare by Miles Fowler

Street sign at night
 

Late on a warm summer night in 1979, my housemate Lenny and I were shooting the breeze at the kitchen table when we heard a long squeal, followed by some loud bangs, interspersed with another squeal and, finally, a crashing sound that seemed to occur in slow motion. At least it went on long enough for Lenny and me to look each other quizzically in the eye. At the time I was renting a room in a house on Broadway in Somerville, Massachusetts, sharing kitchen and dining areas with seven other twenty-something men and women. … Continue reading A Late Night Scare by Miles Fowler

The Photography of Will Kerner

young girl next to wooden pillar at construction site
 

  “To me photography is a blend of serendipity, of good fortune and conscious selection and structuring. I need to apply skill and I need to get lucky,” says Charlottesville photographer Will Kerner. “The skill is composing, lighting, using the camera properly. The luck is that which the subjects give you.” A commercial and wedding photographer for 28 years, Will Kerner cross-pollinates his professional skills shooting both weddings and travel images. When shooting a wedding, says Kerner, he’s constantly seeking to capture the moment, looking at available light, creating the composition. “Then when traveling, my … Continue reading The Photography of Will Kerner

Streetlight Magazine is the non-profit home for unpublished fiction, poetry, essays, and art that inspires. Submit your work today!