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...
Art by Patricia Bour-Schilla
The Fruit Of Summer
By Jan Zita Grover ● 2008
My nails have been black for over a week now. This is the price I pay for picking mulberries, whose juice has a staining power the military might want to look into. Under the guilty tree, a (doomed) white car has been parked for the past nine days, and I know from experience that its hood will never be pure white again: pale pink blooms will adorn its surface, souvenirs of its time beneath that tree.
Trust
By Kevin FitzPatrick ● 2008
"You'll get a ticket parked that way," I called. A slim black woman in cleaning clothes that workers wear at Regions Hospital had parked her rusty car along the curb, but pointed south, the wrong way on that street.
Notes on the Winter Carnival Medallion Hunt
By Brad Yaritz ● 2008
Just about the time our Vikings' season is over, all of the grass is covered by snow. The mornings of scraping the ice off your windshield have become repetitive. It's getting to the coldest time of the year. Thanks to the great City of Saint Paul, there's a week of celebration in the snow. Parents and their families come out of their homes. It's like a Minnesota version of a hibernation break. After months of being indoors, the Saint Paul Winter Carnival and the great treasure hunt are finally here!
River Prayer
By Linda Back McKay ● 2007
The old man was not really in a rowboat under the Mississippi River bridge. He was in the process of turning inside himself, as we all will do one day...
Art by Patricia Bour-Schilla
Boyd Park
By Virginia L. Martin ● 2007
The Selby-Dale Freedom Brigade, which emerged out of this melange of ideologies, objected to using Kittson’s name for the park on the grounds that this nineteenth-and early twentieth-century entrepreneur was not a fit man to memorialize. Not only had he had at least two and as many as four Native American “wives” before marrying European Mary Kittson, he sold liquor to the Indians and bought their fur pelts for a pittance and sold them for exorbitant amounts. One brigade member said Kittson “personifies the destructive, imperialistic aspect of American history,” and he urged that parks and public buildings be named “for people who have contributed to the struggles faced by those exploited.”
The Turf Club By Jenny Gehlhar
By Jennifer Gehlhar ● 2007
The Turf Club is an historic landmark in the Twin Cities music world. One might wonder how this club set in the Midway—the land between downtown Minneapolis and downtown Saint Paul—amongst porn and pawn shops, liquor stores and Ax Man, maintains a name at all. This is not the hubbub of nightlife; no river views, no skyscrapers, no horse carriages or antique fire trucks, no pretty street lights, no Snoopy. It's University bus stops and Snelling traffic.