CENTRAL CORRIDOR VOICES | University Ave: A poem

January 13, 2013

Photo by Diego Vazquez Jr.

“Pho all the way around,”
The leather jacket boy says
While the girls compare nail polish.
The steaming bowls
With plump shrimp swimming
Between the transparent noodles
And beef slices arrive. Then
The click of chopsticks,
The happy slurp from spoons.

Loren Niemi is a storyteller, poet, performer, public policy consultant, and trainer who either has a short attention span or multiple converging interests. He is also author of The Book of Plots and coauthor, with Elizabeth Ellis, of Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories. Loren is part of the Saratoga Studio A.M. Sunday Writers, which meets every other Sunday morning in a small studio above a garage in St. Paul.

Coverage of issues and events affecting Central Corridor communities is funded in part by a grant from the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative.

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More from Central Corridor Voices

In 2012, artists Diego Vázquez, Jr., Shaquan Foster, Patricia Young, Kimberly Nightingale, and Lisa Steinmann created two related Irrigate-funded projects: "Lowertown Voices" and "University Avenue Voices." The two projects produced 14 large-scale posters and one 200-square-foot banner that were installed at various points along the light rail corridor, from August through December, 2012. The posters and banners feature excerpts from stories originally published in The Saint Paul Almanac. The stories were chosen to be site-related, to tell the stories from neighborhoods along the light rail corridor in the voices of local citizens. The artists all met while working as community editors for the 2013 edition of the St. Paul Almanac.

This Daily Planet series pairs stories, as originally published in the St. Paul Almanac, with photographs of the storytellers holding their posters.

CENTRAL CORRIDOR VOICES | How St. Paul's Boyd Park almost had a different name

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CENTRAL CORRIDOR VOICES | A pint-sized child: A poem

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