Rachel Barga Simpson lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband and three children. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, a master’s in Speech-Language Pathology, and zero accreditations in parenthood. Her poetry is forthcoming in the spring issue of Ever Eden Literary Journal.
Winter Sacrament
The mind can be a cobwebbed corner.
It is not good for the soul to hibernate there.
In such times take a walk outside. Bring regret black and shame gray,
let them slip like ash through your fingers at a fieldside funeral.
Absolve yourself:
I cannot hold you anymore.
Keep your eyes wide for teaberry, sugar maple flame, dandelion that will not die,
wild onion climbing from impossible ground.
Press these offerings thumb to palm:
Let the earth anoint me.
Though you must excuse more elusive hues,
springtime violets and summer blues
when you return home, heart full of borrowed color,
muse that you are carrying the sky.
By In Parentheses in IP Volume 5
64 pages, published 1/15/2020
From the Editor:
We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.
Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
in parentheses 
enter the discussion: