Delia López plans to win her school’s “Make a Buzz!” contest. She figures she’s leading so far, at least in the fourth grade. On a warm Sunday afternoon in early February, she walks to Elk Neck State Park with the boxful of bees she made over the weekend. She’s going to activate the bees in the park and get a ranger to sign off on how many she has, so she can add that total to her contest scoresheet. Her teachers have explained how important the contest is. Without it, they said, there wouldn’t … Continue reading Monarch by Kris Faatz→
Kate Sheridan is the 1st place winner in Streetlight’s 2021 Essay/Memoir Contest I wasn’t always a thief. But some losses demand rebalancing. Redistribution. Retribution? In hindsight, I should have asked for the house. But the habit of self-sacrifice was so ingrained it barely crossed my mind. Instead, in the dead of winter I took our tiny travel trailer to a campground along the river and left him our two-bedroom rancher on its fertile country acre. Later that spring, when I moved into a real house, I took only the minimum from the home we’d … Continue reading Garden Thief by Kate Sheridan→
On a warm winter day when I was five or six, I knelt on a bench in Central Park and watched as water ran down behind a sheath of ice on the face of a granite boulder. Some ten years later in Ivy, Va., my sister had left her watercolors and paper on our sun porch. I had never painted before, but I suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to paint the trees outside the window. Those two episodes, clearly remembered, framed the beginning of my painting life. From … Continue reading Rivers and Streams: Paintings by John Howard→
We used to wedge our tiny dirty un- girly fingernails into the flesh of the dowdy pine trees plotted in the concrete squares that defined our territory. Indian Bread, someone called it, someone stupid. But we were stupid, too. We hungered so hard to put something real in our mouths. Every night my mother plopped a can of fruit cocktail and a pile of green peas on the chipped plates. I couldn’t put my elbows on the table while we chewed. How incredible it felt to peel the grey bark back and cull the new … Continue reading Indian Bread by Amy-Sarah Marshall→
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