Cold Night
2011
My feet are cold—the car is cold—the car sounds like a bucket of bolts Rolling down a hill— it’s so cold that my breath falls like ice from the roof...
Early Spring
2011
Pale vision on an early day: two gray wings gliding flat balance on the body’s straight line. A trill rises from the meadow....
Tracks
2011
Before I was born There was movement Paddles pushing pent up people through oceans of pain That explains my fear of water When I was born There was movement still
Saint Paul Poet Laureate Carol Connolly: Poem for the Second Inauguration of Mayor Chris Coleman on January 4, 2010
2011
We stand on the edge of a New Year, full, it is, of endless possibilities. Somehow, we climbed the steep hills of the year just past, none of it easy, our seven hills dotted with lights steady in the dark of night, hills alive now with the beauty of a new snow that stopped traffic everywhere.
Old Saint Paul
By W. A. Alexander ● 2011
Old Saint Paul, up and down your ripped up sidestreets, kids roam, hands deep in pockets, snapping ice with each step. Their mothers poke out of houses, “Time to come inside,” they say, waiting to hang blankets off shoulders and brush the child’s hair from his face.
Secrets
2011
I search the concourse for the family, a family whose people were swept away by a river red with blood. Swept when a secret war ended. Swept from the mountains of Laos, Swept in one day from the steamy jungle to Minnesota’s pre-dawn dark.
Anthem
2011
Gathering in St. Paul 40 years after Selma, the speakers’ arms pump and flail; the voices of the preacher and senator ring out and we step into the stream like revelers, cheerful on the buoyant morning, walking the half-mile from Central High School to Concordia College.
Still Life, St. Paul
By Carolyn Williams-Noren ● 2011
On the coldest day of the year, a man stepped onto the 21 bus carrying a vase of lilies, shell pink, tall as a child in his arms. He sat behind the driver with the flowers in his lap.
Letter From United
2011
Of course I heard voices in the night, saw visions, felt the presence of dying, that white, fringed place. Shallow breath, narrow entrance— the door to death opened. Then came steroids and their lack of inhibition. There was terror. I admit it.
New Year
By Donna Isaac ● 2011
On the south shoreline of the Mississippi in Saint Paul one black eagle breaks the tree line...
S.O.S. Saint Paul to Buenos Aires: Juan Pablo, are You Listening?
2010
Funny how two people can get the feel of each other in two bars two bars of a tango a woman from the top of the world a man from the bottom of the world in the middle of a circus in the middle of an industrial zone en el Rio Plata in the middle of Buenos Aires.