From Mears Park in Spring
2015
If you are walking on the sidewalk beside a tall building and, arriving at a cluster of orange cones, look up
Miss Decides She’s Had Enough
2015
I’ve been here for ages, my power formed this land right, all curves and banks, low countryside and limestone bluffs.
Osceola, Osceola
2015
We were moving to Saint Paul after a year in Ireland, all ten of us packed into a tiny Fiat station wagon for the drive from New York to a big house on an even bigger hill set on Osceola Avenue.
Van Gogh Appears at the Café Amore
2015
No chairs fly through the air tonight, no linseed oil drips from a homemade brush, no argument ensues over process, for Gauguin does not appear,
I Only Wanted Chicken
2015
I always like to think about the fun one could have around the late 1960s. We could dance the night away. The clubs you could go to if you wanted to dress up or dress down.
A Garden That Changes
2015
Even though it seems like the economy has gone through the wrong tunnel, we as a community have to keep going through the right tunnel. We come together as one, to a place where everyone can pitch in and get something in return.
Imniza Ska (“White Cliffs” of Saint Paul)
2015
One day in June 2011, my wife, Mary Beth Faimon, and I took a riverboat cruise on the Mississippi River from Harriet Island in Saint Paul. On the cruise, I saw, for the first time, Imniza Ska, the white cliffs that line the Mississippi River.
Rondo Pioneers
By Danta Wilson, D’Onna Clark, Damone Presley, Erica Dennis, Maya Clark, Mietta Green, DaVante Jackson ● 2014
As the Black poet J. Saunders Redding said: The relationship between a people and their history is the same as the relationship between a child and its mother; history not only tells a people where they are and what they are—history also informs us what we still must be and what we still must do.
“The Chug and Deubner Hill”
2014
I grew up in the West End on Arbor Street, by the old Schmidt Brewery. One of our pastimes in the mid-fifties was building and racing “chugs,” which were homemade go-carts, made entirely of found parts—boards, bent nails we straightened with a hammer on the sidewalk, and of course the most cherished find, wheels big enough to use (many baby carriages were wheel-less that summer).
The River Bench Series, Garden Encounter
2014
The Cherokee Heights Garden Club has celebrated seventy-five years of service. They have faithfully beautified and tended the flowers on Smith Avenue at the High Bridge for years. Returning from
Ironic Meetings of Ghosts at the Irish Fair of Minnesota on Saint Paul’s Harriet Island
2014
The Irish Fair’s site along the pewter-gray, spreading Mississippi beneath downtown Saint Paul on the ample greensward of Harriet Island is majestic and invites celebration. The bustling and music-crammed Irish Fair with its snowy canvas tents, its black-tinted signposts, and plentiful green turf offers an Ireland of the mind to its visitors.
The Zoo at Night
2014
You’re not alone with your sleeplessness. The lion is roaring. There’s a peacock, too, though you didn’t recognize its call until Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom went to India. You’re not alone because a distant siren cues the timber wolves, all of them except the shy ebony outsider, the only one who doesn’t fight over the salami your brother tosses into the Wolf Woods.