Art by Chad Hambright

Good River Feeling Bad

By J. Otis Powell‽ ● 2015

Her voice is deep water, Though she’s too shallow this year for ships, Her body more round than angular, When I ask her questions I get more, Answers than I know what to do with, She says her name in whispers

Art by Lisa-Marie Greenly

Young Sins

By Beth L. Voigt ● 2015

“Mom, what’s a sin?” Mom straightened the newspapers on the coffee table, picked up my brother’s two sweat socks and his blue Highland Groveland baseball shirt, and moved the armchair

Blessed for Life

By Mike Hazard ● 2015

A wild-looking man I don’t know from Adam begged a ride from the PO to the Dorothy Day Center. He’s jazzed, jazzed about a Thanksgiving feast. With a shock of

Saint Paul Connections: The Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Struggle

By Peter Rachleff ● 2015

The August 28, 2013, march in Saint Paul commemorating the fif­tieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington expressed the historic interconnections of the labor movement and the civil rights

POW WOW

By Maryam Marne Zafar ● 2015

The steady drum beat. The high trilling voices. The whipping colors of the people.   POW WOW!   The soft stomping of moccasins upon the earth matching the shush-shush shuffle

Art by Bob Muschewske

True Myth

By Heid E. Erdrich ● 2014

Tell a child she is composed of parts (her Ojibway quarters, her German half-heart) she’ll find the existence of harpies easy to swallow. Storybook children never come close to her mix, but manticores make great uncles...

Purgatory

By Sharon Chmielarz ● 2013

It is love and sensing the departed is present somewhere between being able to be reached or not. Neither alive nor dead. It is searching, hopefully, for him...

Butterflies on Selby

By David Lyndale ● 2011

There is a café on Selby where I go to clear my mind and listen to the stories old Black men tell. Outside the café is a planter and in

November

By Diane Wilson ● 2010

I raise my baton, a rake, a half-chewed stick: dry leaves crackle, snap tympani for the horn toot of geese flying south.

Somewhere I’ll Find You

By Phebe Hanson ● 2008

So we moved from my small town in western Minnesota to St. Paul where I had to go to Murray High, a school with more people than in the entire town of Sacred Heart...

The Ford Bridge

By Vernon Holmberg ● 2007

As a forbidden summer activity, we enjoyed swimming at the Ford Bridge over the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

Rondo Oral History: Deborah Gilbreath Montgomery

By Kate Cavett ● 2007

My name is Debbie Gilbreath Montgomery. I grew up at 978 Saint Anthony, which is on the corner of Saint Anthony and Chatsworth.