It was the summer of 1972. At the time I lived with my parents on a modest 110-acre dairy farm. Imagine a white clapboard farmhouse with a front porch, a weathered gray barn, pastures abuzz with grasshoppers, and black-and-white cows slurping water out of a...
I’m learning a new language. The structure of Czech is entirely different from English; meaning is contained in word order and declination, so that just by changing endings on the same root word, you can create whole new sentences. The possibilities the syntax...
Which woman most influenced my creative life? First, I think of Virginia Woolf, then Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Friedan. What about Tillie Olsen? Surely, Sylvia Plath or Adrienne Rich. Rearrange them in whichever order you wish. It...
Every time I sit to write a poem, essay, or even a journal entry, I sense the collective muse of women from the past, whose courage and vision allowed my generation of women the luxury and privilege of putting our pens to paper. From the Suffragists to the...
keep it real sister teacher arrived on the scene with instructions from the master, sowing love among the exotic herbs and wild flowers of her gardens. up came a harvest of children who caught her challenge to learn in spite of color, status, or address....
It’s oxymoronic, isn’t it, to speak up as a voice for silence? Maybe that comes from the perspective of this poet with a voice disability. What I say out loud is a cross between edgy and strangled. I’ve wondered if it isn’t a clue that I should listen more. The...
She doesn’t know my face or my name but she held me afloat. Courage comes in many colors but her kind glows in the dark. I gave her my biggest fears and she handed me her dreams, the silly ones that made me laugh when I felt emptied out inside. She walked the...
Seedpod of iris. What a perfect image for Mimi, the consummate gardener! How many gardens of hers have I helped dig, transplant; watched her preside over; shared the bounty from; commented on the design for . . . In Andover, her garden wound around drive and...
Happy Leap Year! Happy birthday to my daughter’s junior high art teacher, who is technically only 10, so younger than all her students. And Happy Last-Day-of-the 29/29 Leap-Year-Edition challenge. At the start of the month, I joined a writers’...
Reviewed by Emily Shearer, Poetry Editor We are proud to announce the release of a new chapbook by Minerva Rising poet Jennifer Collins, whose work was featured in Issue #3. Oil Slick Dreams is now available from Finishing Line Press at...
