Straylight Magazine

“I don’t reckon there’s anyplace else on earth a poor boy like me could come up off a farm, barefoot and ragged, and send his boys to Harvard. It could only happen here, in this country, in this place. “

“For the most part, it’s really dark images in my collages, people in surgery, or even Vietnam vets. I like to use deep dark images that show the reality of life for some people, and how terrible it is/can be.”

"At least, the good laugh—

not like when she told them

about her Little Mermaid dream—

wordless, finless, homeless." 

"These are the people I grew up fearing? She had felt the hostility in the airport in Lathrop, and it had shocked her, but the white folks she saw out the Buick’s window looked like they could barely afford to gas up their pickups, much less terrorize a race of people."

"Cheryl was used to white people staring at her hair and her clothes, appearing startled when she spoke flawless English, but never in her life had she silenced a room like this. "

Amanda Galvez’s new poem is now published on our website, straylightmag.com!

Read Ahmed M. Hasan’s #FlashFiction “Critical Moments” on our website!

“I You are not you, however.  That is, you are not the you

You are to me.  I have met you, I see you,

But you do not see you.  You are divided into inner

And outer.  You hide. (One thing I can do is see souls.)”

“I met my new roommate, John Clark Hoover, on the first day at college. He was spread out on a multicolored quilt reading Slaughterhouse Five, smoking a joint. He greeted me with a simple wave of his jointed hand without taking his eyes off the book’s page. He eventually offered me a toke, which I readily accepted. I unpacked my belongings and sheeted my well-used mattress. John passed some gas. We laughed. Welcome to college, gentlemen.“

“Realization did not

set me free. I did

not let go, I could

not        

    move on.”

This week, we asked J.E. Crum about her beautiful and creative art process!

“Then, as far as the hand-made printmaking paper goes, I ordered a pack of it to create more drawings like this one that I created in 2015, titled”Fight or Flight.” I worked with charcoal and oil pastels for most of my time in my budding studio in 2014, but I slowly started to use watercolors as well.“

“For nearly forty years, the builder-grade split-levels had squatted side by side in a cul-de-sac south of Atlanta. Only skeletal remains of shrubs dotted the perimeter of the house on the right. Extravagant rosebushes adorned the house on the left, where Joan knelt with pruning shears, her cutting making a reassuring sssst-sssst sound as she moved among the flowers. Far from wilting in the heat, the roses arched their flame-bright petals to the sun. One of Joan’s yellow gardening gloves caught on a thorn. She left it there, blending in with the flowers and, sitting back on her heels, dabbed her face with the back of an arm.”

J.E. Crum is an artist who creates vivid self-portraits inspired by mythologies. Working intuitively, Crum creates narratives related to thoughts about fate, destiny and dreams.

Flash Fiction: BLACK BOTTOM

The streets and yards of Black Bottom were all in-bounds: no fair going inside anybody’s house. On deep summer nights when the electricity got shut off—we never knew why—there would be no faint-blue light from the old streetlights, and in our houses, just candles and maybe an old kerosene lamp shining through the windows and front screen doors. Up in Dreher Park, all the lights were still burning. Our small, red plastic flashlights were the only lights outside, but in the pitch black, they could shine all the way across the river. Some nights—real late when we were still wet with sweat from playing for hours—we thought we saw the three kids who had drowned, swimming toward us.