(Click on the title to view the whole piece)
 

I Believe in Miracles
 
Tony wore beautiful cashmere sweaters and sturdy Frye boots. Often, he had a colored kerchief wrapped around his neck. He could play straight if he wanted to, but there was little reason to play what you weren't at our college, even in this particular place and time: the very strange mid-70's where Free Birds and Dancing Queens coexisted on the same radio dial.
 
Terry Barr

 

Pancakes with Jupiter
 
Standing alone in the field, our black walnut tree is free to grow in any shape that benefits it, rather than straight up as it would have in a dense forest. This makes for a more unruly branching out, as if the tree had been liberated from the constraint of polite society. The trunk of a field Juglans branches early, the limbs spread wide and crooked, eventually arching up and out to a well-formed crown.
 
Barbara Brennan

 

To Thee Do We Cry (Spotlight Runner-Up!)
 
My birth certificate tells everything the state of Montana considered pertinent in 1965: "Rita Ann (Schiltz) Sheehy: Live Births: 10. Fetal Deaths: 5." A mother, boiled down. Ninety years. Eleven living children, of whom I am the last.
 
John Sheehy

 

Da! Da! Da! A Seance with a Sybil
 
I recalled my father's comment that Bulgaria was the "garden" of southeastern Europe, and it came to mind on those side trips during which I heard more than once the complaint that the Turks prevented any middle class, and the one nascent around 1900 was lost to Nazi domination by the mid-20th century and suffocated after WW II by the Soviets.
 
Jascha Kessler

 

What a Stone Weighs
 
There was a time, a long time, when the weight seemed infinite, too heavy to contemplate. But that time had passed as we took delivery of a headstone for our son.
 
Steve Dehner