At a recent conference I attended, a young woman stepped to the microphone to address keynote speaker Nick Flynn. “I teach yoga at the same homeless shelter where you worked in Boston. Your book Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is my favorite book. It gives me hope of finding my father.” Flynn replied, “Thank you for the good work you do. As for rest, the best thing my mother ever did was to leave my father. It was a really good thing I didn’t grow up with him in my life.” And yet. The … Continue reading Quest for Our Fathers, Living Still by Carole Duff→
when the horizon dips into darkness unsure about dawn, I touch the faded photo, your face still wearing a mere wisp of pink blurred now into brushed-aside memories. death is a trickster. it comes and goes as morning turns to night turns to day and we call it life until it isn’t. the old camera watched my childhood leapfrog. I grew up too soon, learned about dying before living and your too-short journey left us lost looking behind doors, behind trees, playing hide-and-seek that never ended even after night fell. so I tucked away small … Continue reading some days by Marsha Owens→
I despise Halloween. I don’t wish ill of others. I hand out candy. I praise fairies and princesses, soldiers and supermen. I even humor parents who dress infants as vegetables or baby birds—but all the while, I’m inwardly rolling my eyes, wishing the night to be done. I blame this on one childhood Halloween: the night that penicillin stood between me and perfection. This was during the late 1950s, before every drug and grocery store sold plastic masks and costumes. We dressed in whatever getups we could find, and I had waited a lifetime, I … Continue reading Haunted By Halloween by Priscilla Melchior→
All my life I’ve been attracted to weird things. And all my life I’ve been very much aware that other people think I’m weird for being attracted to those weird things. Sometimes it’s that I can’t help but be drawn in by all the different facets of human darkness. Sometimes it’s that I get interested in a subject that seems complicated and obscure, and extremely boring, to others. But whatever my latest passion is at the moment I can be sure that it’s not something that a whole lot of other people understand. For a … Continue reading Being Weird Is a Good Thing. It’s Time to Embrace Yourself as a Writer by Lauren Sapala→
Julia Ballerini is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight Magazine’s 2019 Short Fiction Contest. I was persuaded, if not coerced, to join a group therapy session. My boss was concerned about my mental well-being. I panic when I have to speak in a setting with more than two other people. I rarely utter a word during meetings unless obliged to give a report or am asked a question. On these occasions, I flush bright red from my face down to my neck and chest. I jumble words. My discomfort is highly visible and audible. It … Continue reading What Do You Feel by Julia Ballerini→
From the Flume The banks of the West Ausable River Is a place you’ve never been. Staring straight down into the flume Violent bursts of water over Great granite boulders mesmerizes The boys, but I pull them back To trek a well worn path through Tall timothy, navigating our poles Around brush and beaver dams, Following the sound of gurgling river water Till finally, finding still waters, they cast. Cormorant In mid-afternoon sun I’ve stared for an hour At the lone cormorant perched twenty feet from shore On the remains of a tree grounded … Continue reading From the Flume and The Cormorant, 2 poems by Barbara Tifft→
So, you’ve read a literary magazine’s guidelines, you’ve even read its sample poems available online, or ordered a recent copy of the magazine to learn about what they publish. Maybe you’ve taken a class/workshop in which your poems were critiqued by peers and a popular teacher. But, how is it that some of our poems we have toiled over to the point that they are strong and seem to be the best they can be, do not get selected for publication by the journals where we’ve chosen to send them? As a poetry editor, I’ve … Continue reading Is Your Poem Ready for Submission? by Roselyn Elliott→
because hope is a motherfucker, i went up to each house of the dead and knocked, but no one answered. still, i am haunted: the sun sets a little dimmer ever since the last feeble twitch of that cat’s tail, even while its head lay red & bashed on the dusked asphalt, the traffic passing and passing. because the heat doesn’t work properly, we huddle nose to nose, the trauma of the world reduced to a single stray hair strangled in the neck of your tee, golden in the breath of the bedside lamp; to … Continue reading when i say i, i mean i by Joanna Lee→
I paint to find out what I think about the world; to discover the things I do not have words for. With collage, I love the randomness of the snippets of text and photographs appearing and disappearing that becomes the subject’s likeness. Even as photos and text become part of the pattern of lights and dark that create a coherent likeness, they also retain their … Continue reading Geoffrey Stein Updated→
My wife wants me to write my own obituary. Write a draft in the third person and revise it as many times as it takes to produce a short, readable account of a life that will make sense, if at all, only in retrospect, when a theme or at least a pattern might emerge from the confusion of places I’ve lived, schools I’ve attended, jobs I’ve held. Put it in the safe with my other end-of-life papers, the insurance policies, list of passwords, living will, last will. And no, she stipulates, I may not make … Continue reading Work in Progress by Philip Lawton→
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