This year my credit card company sent me a birthday card. In simple red, white and blue it wished me a happy birthday from Credit One. It is nice of my credit card to put the effort in to send a physical card when an email would have done it. My mom sent a text. My credit card puts the work in. It knows how to rupture and repair. It gives double miles at thousands of convenient locations all over the world. My credit card is senpai Uwu. I’ll never have to ask for it … Continue reading Maxed Out by Jason Montgomery→
My eyes, full of my husband’s body thinning, swelling, sleeping— too full to notice the plant, six feet tall, emerald leaves splitting, fraying the air. One, then another branch breaks, piercing my myopia. I weigh a faux substitute I can’t kill. Then think of my man, how this is his Costa Rica across from his TV and chair. Double down—spend a few hundred dollars, buy a pot large enough to hug, two fat bags of soil. Hire two strong men to tip the plant, coax it from its stranglehold into the large container without crushing. … Continue reading The Investment by Jacqueline Coleman-Fried→
Why does she get all the praise just because she pushed the witch into blood-burning flames it was me who gathered shiny white pebbles glistening like promises under a gibbous moon it was me who scattered breadcrumbs not my fault they were eaten by a murder of crows, slick and black it was me who the witch was fattening waiting like a flesh-eating ogress with taloned fingers and frenzied hair it was clever me who offered her the scrawny bone instead of my fleshy finger it was me, clever me, who whispered to Gretel tell … Continue reading Hansel by Claire Rubin Scott→
Katherine Slaughter has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest Oppenheimer: Back to the Future In the movie theater, I clenched my shoulders and hunched in anticipation of the blast; I could feel the tightness in my jaw. The time between the image and the subsequent sound of the explosion was akin to the space between a lightning strike and a thunderous storm: the interminable wait until the explosion erupted with all its furious sound. Viscerally, I had a sense of generational deja vu. I had grown up in the 1940s and … Continue reading The Oppenheimer Retrospective by Katherine Slaughter→
Dominik Slusarczyk is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Flash Fiction Contest We stay up all night drinking. When we eventually crawl into our tents the sun is already half way up. the rest of our party are getting up, ready to start their day, as we finish ours. —- “Being awake during the day is better” Jim says. There are multiple sizzling frying pans on the fire behind him. We are cooking bacon, eggs, steaks, anything the people cooking could find. The smell of the food fills the air and makes my … Continue reading Holidays by Dominik Slusarczyk→
Deborrah Corr has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest The red onion is a purple globe. I hold it, let my skin adore its slick, smooth contours. Then I bear down with a knife. A slice reveals a maze. No, I’ve misspoken. I’m mistaken. There are no passages with doorways through which you wander, puzzled how to get to the center and find your way back again. Just white corridors, inescapable layers, lined in lilac. Rotating, arriving always where you started. I begin to think monotony. I think hospital hallways, blank anxiety. … Continue reading The red onion by Deborrah Corr→
The first thing Sam Abell entreats his workshop students to do is imagine their photographs without a primary subject. “I cover up the subject with my hand and ask, is there still a photograph under here?” says the celebrated National Geographic photographer, who has lived just west of Charlottesville for going on fifty years. “The answer, almost always, is no.” That can be a tough lesson for eager photographers, but it’s easier to swallow coming from such a calm and sympathetic teacher. It makes a difference, too, that Abell has always practiced what he … Continue reading For Albemarle’s Sam Abell, Photographs Come from Within. By Russell Hart→
Tim Suermondt has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2024 Poetry Contest It’s Done, Beautifully Again My wife, Pui Ying, shows me her latest poem “I hope I did what I wanted to do here.” What she did do is stark and lush, an abandoned castle, and a boulevard teeming with revelers opening the reserve of morning, a welcoming— how difficult it is to merge a heartache with a gratitude and make it work, on the page as well as in life. I tell her I may be stealing some of her images—the old dynasty … Continue reading It’s Done, Beautifully Again by Tim Suermondt→
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