Linda Parsons: The Other Side

To unlock my Akashic records, I speak my name three times to the psychic, echo the spell that flew Dorothy over the rainbow, farther still, home to sepia Kansas. I ask who is around me, and my grandmother affirms her presence, holding the porcelain dogs I once played with. Then my father, with fatherly advice (pay clear attention: you have everything inside to face whatever comes: you are protected). When I ask about my mother, the psychic sighs. Bless her heart—she struggles. Even on the other side, she can’t break the tyranny of self. She’s trying, she tells the psychic, and apologizes for our hardship, her obstinate tongue, earthly lessons unlearned. I’m sorry, too, I say to my mother, for the jumbled wires in your brain, the years I couldn’t go near you but couldn’t stay away. Sorry, I’m no longer your Dorothy, small and meek. I’ve traveled through poppy fields to Oz’s great door and reawakened to brilliant home. Across the thinning veil, I say: Be the girl whose heart’s desire was within her all along. Cross over to the endless green rainbowing above and below. Follow, follow your road.

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Copyright 2026 Linda Parsons


Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville.