Category: Issue 188

Communicable

By Anita Tanner     Or right-click here to download the audio file: Communicable   “Religion is like small pox.  If you get a good dose, you wear scars.” —Vardis Fisher   Dosage:  Words stretch and elongate, strain and break from overuse, disintegrate or bind too tight, the life blood cut off from appendages, sermons …

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Advent: Moose in Moonlight

By Anita Tanner     Or right-click here to download the audio file: Advent: Moose in Moonlight   …he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him there is no beauty that we should desire him.                            —Isaiah 53:2   …

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In My Father’s House

By Cecil Morris     Or right-click here to download the audio file: In My Father’s House   The house that dementia built my father filled with people.  It hummed with talk both day and night, a host of long lost relatives returned to relive stories he had never shared with me.  Sometimes I was …

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Four Paws Full

by R. A. Christmas     Or right-click here to download the audio file: Four Paws Full   Dog had his paws full. He’d run Bad Pup off because Bad wanted his job (and glory) but Bad took a third of of a litter with him.   There was hell to pay, with Bad (The …

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Still Mormon

By Dayna Patterson     Or right-click here to download the audio file: Still Mormon   1. I’m Mormon the way stars—rubbed out at noon, robbed by sun—still burn   2. The way a geode empty of its quartz is still stone   3. The way a whisper is still a breath carved by tongue …

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Articles of New Faith

By Heather Holland     Or right-click here to download the audio file: Articles of New Faith     Invocation. A novice—raging away from the charred and blistered home of my former faith— I am called by the air in my lungs and the dirt beneath my feet to stand and to breathe, to begin …

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Virga: The Long Streaks of Grief

By Anita Tanner     Or right-click here to download the audio file: Virga: The Long Streaks of Grief   Initially it’s a downpour you fear will never stop, but it’s cleansing in the sense that there’s an emptying, and you reach utter bottom where the dregs live.   Not that you wear your grief …

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Call Me by My Name

By Stephen Carter     Or click here to download the audio file: Call Me by My Name     When I was in first grade, I decided to change my name. Well, not change it, exactly, but switch it. My parents had called me by my middle name since I was born—mainly, I think, …

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I See the Moon

By Kevin Rex       Or, right-click to download the audio file here: I See the Moon   My mom named and blessed all of our cars, christening Ruby, a 1968 Chevy, as our first van. Mom had the priesthood back then, even before those damn liberal Christian sects gave women the priesthood. Ruby’s …

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