Stealing Japanese poetry requires great skill, almost Ninja-like stealth, especially at night when there are so many poets out viewing the moon and, in Winter, the snow. But it’s best not to do it then because your tracks can easily be traced back to the scene of the crime. In Spring there’s not enough leaves to hide behind. But if you wait until Summer, when trees are fat and thick with green, then it will be hard to see the moon when it first rises. And always be careful in Autumn— the haunting sound of … Continue reading Stealing Japanese Poetry by Robert Harlow→
It rained the day before so burying the cat wasn’t as hard as she thought it would be. She found a shovel in the shed, and wrapped her pet in an old towel and a grocery bag and put it in the hole like that, not wanting to see the life gone from his eyes. She shoveled the dirt back, then walked in the woods that bordered their two acres until she found a sufficient rock to keep animals from digging him up. She had met the truck for the delivery of the beds and … Continue reading The New House by Dawn Abeita→
Rebecca Watkins has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself changed in his bed to some monstrous kind of vermin.” —The Metamorphosis *** It was winter, 2021 when my first Nespresso machine, Helga, died. I am not the kind of person who names my personal belongings, but I figure it would be more enjoyable to read “The Story of Helga” instead of “The Story of the Nespresso Machine,” so I am calling her Helga. I had noticed, once or … Continue reading Cockroaches in Coffee Pots by Rebecca Watkins→
Teaching, too, is labor. Everyday to be up to the task, everyday the master of a hundred worlds, of casual words, and of causal words, to confront the faces added to or taken from. Do you know when you add a thought there, it shows in the eyes, it shows in the mouth’s subtle creases? Do you know, when you stop a thought, when you turn it aside with a straight line, with the shortest distance from there to here, it shows in the brow’s labor? Exhaustion. Do you know that teaching is exhaustion, everyday … Continue reading Teaching by J.R. Solonche→
SUCHNESS Unable to find a bait station, the termite guy says Call me when you’ve trimmed all this. I say It’s supposed to be this way, a cottage garden of its own making and movement, a profusion that sees beyond any preordained order. He sees only thorns, a cloud of white climbers disappearing the stone path. So much suchness is good for the soul. Lord, I’ve tried to tame it, but let me not try to suppose where or what it should be but its own labial pink, its own gallop across borders and walls. … Continue reading SUCHNESS and DITCH LILIES, 2 poems by Linda Parsons→
Immigration Service Camp, Kenedy, Texas – May 1944 Nearly two years had passed since a Peruvian policeman pointed a pistol at him and declared Tadashi Yamada to be “under arrest.” The employee of a Japanese food store in Lima, Tadashi, along with hundreds of other Japanese and Japanese-Peruvians, soon found himself shipped off to internment in Camp Kenedy, Texas. Seizing these people through a deal with Peruvian authorities, the United States government hoped to use them as bargaining chips in exchange for Americans held by the Japanese. But that did not happen. Twenty-four and a … Continue reading New Cut Hay by Lawrence F. Farrar→
This moment demands my attention. Tiny turtles, vulnerable as polar bears, bubble up from their sandy womb, struggle towards light borrowed from the moon, dropped onto the sea. I spend so much time surrounded by concrete, cars, and catastrophe that birth in the wild startles, like the moment fine wine trips over the tongue and without instruction, awakens the palette. Human tragedy tramples parts of the world I can’t find on a map and places I can drive to—just down the road where home-grown shooters kill en masse, shielded by the 2nd Amendment. Just look … Continue reading One Moment Along the Food Chain by Marsha Owens→
They were back at the fountain as she had promised, Nicky’s sweet round belly against the marble ledge as he tried to reach for the penniesnickelsdimes tossed into that over-chlorinated water by puppy-love teens and small children who begged, like Nicky, for change, which she refused to give when he’d come whining five minutes ago, three minutes, two, one. She wasn’t about to raise the kind of person who just went around throwing coins into any pond or stream he saw, necessitating the signs at their zoo and the park with easy hikes. “Please do … Continue reading Fountains by Amy Foster Myer→
Streetlight Voices: Short Fiction & Memoir · Down the Shore by John Adinolfi Podcast: “Down the Shore” is about the rhythm of the sea and a marriage. A fictional story performed by Jennifer Sims. Read the story online: “Down the Shore” by John Adinolfi Jennifer Sims is an actor and voice over artist who has voiced hundreds of projects across all genres. After attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts she wandered into a career in advertising. She worked as an ad agency producer for ten years before she found her way back to her … Continue reading Down the Shore by John Adinolfi→
Philip Newman Lawton has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest My sister Margaret is dead. Her body has gone to cinders, her pain, blown away like smoke. I want to remember her as a child, go back far enough to trace the whole arc of her existence, make sense of it, figure out why she lived and died the way she did, but we grew up in a dysfunctional family, an alcoholic father, a hand-wringing mother, and I was prone to lose myself in books and daydreams. My memories are in … Continue reading Deus Absconditus by Philip Newman Lawton→
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