From a distance I saw a frog, standing like a soldier in a field of summer grass. Up close, the creature looked alive. My curious dog sniffed its warty behind. I, too, touched its stiff and tailless end with the blunt unfeeling tip of my white summer sneaker. Later, we found another: the stretched-out skin of its helmeted head, arched above its shoulders round; its fore and hind legs spread, poised like a soldier for action. Closer inspection showed death: a flat black disc of missing eye and fat, red tongue in locked jaw … Continue reading Blunt Force by Lisa Low→
Doña Chuy For my grandmother, after her favorite song, Solamente una Vez. You were never one for sitting down. And long after it did not work out, you showed who could wear the pants better and built a house. Your hairdresser’s eye arranged an enclosed patio with a lemon tree as its centerpiece. Is this the huerto in which your hope glittered so many years later? A clock of citrus suns by which to measure his ill-timed return. And when the church bells sing in the plaza, you will them to be as faint as … Continue reading Doña Chuy and How I Remember “Inti” is the Kichwa Word for Sun, 2 poems by Eric Odynocki→
Amy Stonestrom is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight Magazine‘s 2020 Essay/Memoir Contest A strange February morning, gray sky lined with tangerine. Ten degrees. From my spot in the front seat, bursts of flame appear to shoot from piles of snow, tall as the houses across the street. Well-insulated children perch on the jagged banks as they wait for technicolor giants to emerge from the earth. Babies bundled in strollers, old men in blaze orange and camouflage. Women in long puffy coats, fur rimming their faces. No place to park. The entire population of the … Continue reading Beautiful Monster by Amy Stonestrom→
Locusts One day I’ll hear you are dead. It will come from some benevolent phone tree or on the wings of locusts, an army of ill will. They will deafen my ears so I never hear my name from your crooked mouth again. Only the endless circling and whirr of wings wailing like a heart beating itself to death Island Leafing through the journal I found a forgotten flamingo feather scavenged from an island filled with sienna skin skin like yours, skin I still smell in sleep. Considerable light is absorbed In the soft dark … Continue reading Locusts and Island, 2 poems by Linda Laino→
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→
Building rituals out of nothingness, I’m sitting on a park bench, reading Wallace Stevens on a sunny day when the flashing shadow of a crow darkens my library book. Perfect, I think. Where are the tigers? Where the red weather? I am a drunken old sailor dreaming and asleep. Where are they? In the grudging light that asked for day the mothers look around, covering their startled babies’ ears. We pick and choose our indignations. Stuart Gunter is working toward a Master’s Degree in Mental Health Counseling at Longwood University and lives in Schuyler, Va. … Continue reading Reading Wallace Stevens at Pen Park by Stuart Gunter→
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!
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