For my father – 1 Higher the swing rose as he pushed. My sister fell backward. He caught her. 2 Hands on the tiller, we steered, the boat heading home on the course he set. Jeanne Julian’s poems have appeared in Naugatuck River...
The Yesterday Today and Tomorrow Tree grew in the garden of our home in South Africa. It usually flowered for one season, purple and white blooms sending their perfume through my parents’ bedroom window. In the year my father died, it flowered beyond its time...
Sometime after the heat of singlehandedly dissolving the heart of the iceberg and before the dream of a black man hit by a train in an all-white city, epiphany let herself enter through my midnight window, settled on my windowsill, welcome and messy as an unexpected...
Photo Credit: www.archdavisdesigns.com Dad was more storyteller than mechanic, leaving his wartime occupation as soon as his tour ended. He was a Bible salesman when he met Mom, but before I was in preschool, my parents made a choice that was unusual for...
A Review by Lindsey and Emily, Editors of Minerva Rising Through her twenty-one poems that reticulate like stepping stones on a snaky garden path, Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick guides her readers through one woman’s version of Gethsemane. Amid vivid images of lush...
The beach has been calling me. I need the walks by the water, the reflection and the renewal. But I’m not up to the six hour drive it takes to get there. Consequently, I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to create that beach tranquility closer to home. My first...
Mother, may I go to him, my brother slave to the needled beast Mother, may I love him the way you never did Mother, may I rest his broken heart at your feet Mother may you mend that heart, shattered and addled, for the weary lot of us...
The small high desert cemetery perched lonely and dry on a forgotten rise past the outskirts of a town that chose to grow in a different direction. The tombstone had reduced the lifetime of this woman’s struggles and joys to her name, dates, and one word—Mother. When...
After urgency by Rusty Morrison How to draw the constantly shifting selves together around an object of scrutiny and let this simply be the way that it’s raining again outside, so lightly, hardly more than fog, so that I leave behind my umbrella, open the...
Editor’s note: We asked our contributors to respond to this spring-related prompt: Using the following phrase as a starting point write for 10 minutes without self-editing: “Collapsing under a canopy of green…” (source: The Journal) *** My town of Great Barrington,...
