The day slipped into dusk as the ambient light ebbed imperceptibly like the liminal moment before the tide changes direction. Robin removed her Ray-Bans and stared up at the wide-open heavens above the El Charco Nature Preserve. Nostalgia? Sadness? Triumph? She couldn’t quite identify the emotions flowing through her young veins. In the surrounding sky, thirty thousand bronze cowbirds swirled and swooped in vast, coordinated waves, forming a shifting black cloud. The very air trembled with their beating wings. It had taken a fair amount of convincing to get several of her sorority sisters to … Continue reading THE MURMURATION by S.W. Gordon →
“I was most grievously undone when I lost my footing on the shelf and swan dived to the floor splayed and back broken”, says the complete works of Shakespeare who now leans against the cash register “We are—so many of us—a musty assemblage of forgotten words. Trees pressed into paper to hold our messages. Conceived by some dreamy word dabbler long gone. Escorting the appreciative few from womb to tomb Yet now shorn of dust jacket now a deterioration of spine dog eared pages and torn scripts Are we soon to be consigned to a … Continue reading Midnight at the Antiquarian Book Shop by Gary Beaumier →
I wondered what it could mean that on my first view of the ocean a dog lay dead in the surf. Bloated and caught on the sand, its black body swelled gently in the come here of waves, its hair an aura around it. No one stirred. Sipping drinks, laughing as though it wasn’t right here, catching the breakers, walking the beach. Why don’t they drag it away? Does nobody see it but me? The tall lap swimmer proclaims at dinner: I saw the dead dog float out to sea. Relieved for us all, … Continue reading All the Things We Do Not See by Megan Atthowe →
Richard Key is the 1st place winner of Streetlight Magazine‘s 2020 Essay/Memoir Contest Honeybees are swarming outside my home office under the eaves of the roofline. I would say they are hovering like tiny drones, except they probably are tiny drones. They seem very interested in a certain corner of the house. I’m afraid I’ll get stung if I investigate too much, but I know exactly what they’re up to. Six years ago we had a similar problem and called in a “bee man” who opened up that same space, vacuumed them out with a … Continue reading Plight of the Humble Bee by Richard Key →
Streetlight Voices: Short Fiction & Memoir · Firedamp by Tonja Matney Reynolds Podcast: A story that captures the dimming light. A fictional story performed by Joe Guay. Read the story online: Firedamp by Tonja Matney Reynolds Follow us!
Yasser Alaa Mobarak grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. When the Egyptian Revolution started in 2011, he was an eighteen-year-old teenager. “The protest took place in Shatby Station, Alexandria. It called for freedom and social justice. I was keen on documenting the new events taking place in my city which I had never witnessed before. I used my compact camera and mobile phone,” he says. “I use photography as a tool of self-expression and documentation. Photographer Dorothea Lange said the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. I studied … Continue reading Yasser Alaa Mobarak: Seeing the Moment →
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