Daniel Lowe is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight‘s 2026 Flash Fiction Contest The river fog clears and rises, and for a few moments the tops of the city’s tallest buildings seem suspended in air. From your perch on the hillside, their windows are portals of white light, like eyes with cataracts reflecting a brilliant sun. Cloud cities exist only in fantasy, fairytale worlds of imagination now overtaken by video, and anyway, you gave up all fantasy other than the sexual kind the day you entered puberty. Perhaps it was a day like this one, a cool … Continue reading Mosaic by Daniel Lowe→
Because no matter the finery she wears she can’t do anything to shake her past Because she can’t seem to shake her past she’s like a long scar in a formal dress Because she trusts the zodiac to run her life she drinks according to the stars and constellations Because she drinks according to stars she counts herself wise as she downs 80-proof misery Because she knows the strength of the stock she came from she can share laughter even while possessed by sorrow Because she can laugh even while she cries she can speak … Continue reading Boxed Wine and Sad Seasons by Tobi Alfier→
For Joanne First snow has hushed the highway, yammer of distant coyotes comes to us as brittle and sharp as icicles dangling from the eaves. Without thought my mind links the stars and traces the ancient outlines –I read Orion standing roughshod on snowy Pine Mountain. No going back—once the dots are connected, those stories are etched for the duration, the stars never again a random scatter of pinpointed lights. The same for speech— we come into this country wordless to find everything already named and so contained by its appellation— once the red and … Continue reading Brimming Over by George Singer→
What’s that? I ask pointing at the x-ray. Oh, that’s your heart. Or a tumor. I should check with the radiologist. Don’t bother. It’s both. My heart is black. Blacker than any organ medical history records. Or so I was told as a teenager by a friend of a friend who was sick of watching me hurt her friend. I had every excuse in the book: I loved her too much, I loved someone else, I wasn’t in love enough. In the end, I hurt everyone involved and failed to learn a thing. And now … Continue reading Diagnosis by Andrew Gent→
Laura Halpin is the 1st place winner of Streetlight‘s 2026 Flash Fiction Contest Every morning, the black and white cat is there with its white and grey pet, the man. By the museum building, by the library, by the ramp. The man brings food and feeds the cat. They converse, matter-of-factly. And people say. The man is off his rocker. Looked after by grown-up children who don’t mind his wandering because actually it’s nice to get a break. His habits are clockwork anyway, he hasn’t the wit to break them. Jabbering to the nice kitty, sweet really, no more part … Continue reading The Cat and The Man by Laura Halpin→
I was born on Halloween, quarter past three in the morning, jaundiced and with a hole in my heart. Or so Mum told me, but she was grumpy about what a pain I had been, so I didn’t push for details. All Hallows’ Eve—hallow meaning saint—is the night before All Saints’ Day on November 1, and is when the departed and beloved are remembered through prayer and song (vespers being Latin for evening). The practice goes back centuries, and includes a rich Celtic influence and history. We knew none of this growing up in Southeast … Continue reading Halloween’s Child by Ping Yi Yee→
Allow me to be a reflection of all of her tastes, including that core piece of her that makes fun of me for not screaming the lyrics of a song about John Deere green. How could I truly love her without owning one pair of Wrangler jeans? It is because I love her I still drive the forty minutes to sit at a field party near a retention pond, where one of her friends, a lawyer now, shoots fireworks over a two-lane highway with multiple decorated crosses for teenagers that couldn’t find the middle lane. … Continue reading Emily as She Spends Three Consecutive Days in Licking County by Darren C. Demaree→
Moray McGowan is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight‘s 2026 Poetry Contest The waxwings that stripped our cherry tree’s last crop dropped guano’d stones in meadows far beyond the sea From the felled tree’s straight and amber grain we carved our firstborn’s crib From glasses perched upon the stump we toasted her first school day We watched her curl up in her fairy dell the roots left as they rotted back into earth, watched her teach her sisters reading and the facts of life she’d learned from books, her gaze on our disasters and her own … Continue reading Stone Circles by Moray McGowan→
Richard Kenney, Jr. has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight‘s 2026 Essay/Memoir Contest “He had a talent for remembering phone numbers and sports statistics.” That was it . . . an obituary’s one-sentence summary of a kid’s life. A kid with a sweet shot and a bucket of promise. A kid trying to find the right touch to life. He is a kid, though, only in my mind. I have not seen him in over forty years. The nine-year-old online obit that I recently stumbled upon said he died at age fifty-five, and that memorial donations … Continue reading Playmaker by Richard H. Kenney, Jr.→
Lincoln Perry launched Magna Cum Laude from Columbia University’s Department of Art in 1971. Not essentially recognizable to those of us who now know his work, he was painting abstractly at the time, digesting such influences as Mondrian and Klee. Exploring the geometry of color; the relationships and influences of one hue upon another and observing the small important skirmishes that occurred along their fashionably flat margins. Those were all early fascinations of the period for him, that would ultimately leave their subtle mark. The following year Perry joined a commune of fellow artists … Continue reading An Artist’s Progress: A Glimpse Into The Art of Lincoln Perry by Deborah McLeod→
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