(My son’s observation) Russia Threatens Nuclear Attack. —News Headline The sky’s movement turns epic over steep red canyons, stacked cumulus that can turn dark, flash daily floods through trails. To your less than a decade, the Canyon Ranger says 60 million years of the earth’s crust can be read in these rocks— ravines worn …
Category: Poetry
Why I Stay (another faith-promoting chiasmus!)
Because if I left the Church my wife’d kill me— and who knows, polygamy might come back! Besides, I’ve been a Mormon for so long I can’t even imagine not being one. And, finally and frankly, I stay because I …
Out of Your Head with Fever
By Anita Tanner “That which had struck into me my first profound terror, when as a child I lay ill with fever: the Big Thing.” —Rainer Maria Rilke Here the kinship of pain, here the account of your own childhood illnesses, the beast that grows in you with every elevated fever, swelling in …
Beg, Ch, Dc, Yo, Tr, Sc
By Anita Tanner Like Morse Code, the language as rhythmic as water, the hook angles, drawn on the thin yarn line to gather and build, a pooling of pastel color, an acrylic lap, stria of stitches where a part becomes the whole. No matter the signs— filet, shell, cable— fingers fast in form follow …
Shadows of the Heart
By Larsen Bowker I’d always assumed we all get some small bit of wisdom before we die, believing it came from some centrifugal force of the mind, but at nearly eighty and no sign of any, I was scaling back on this gentle hubris, until I heard some in a friend’s voice …
Love and Virtue
By Jeff Nydegger In a timid thought by chance I traced A faint and fleeting path. Like a rabbit trail, it seemed too shy To promise much to any traveler. And more than once, I lost sight of it among my gadding thoughts. But as a nerve would spurn against the body’s foes, So …
Departures
By Anita Tanner Some people move away without leaving— when you see them you can’t tell where they are. Others accompany their parting with angry words— you don’t discern the silence inside. You’ve seen them crying in the bedroom behind locked doors or standing at the kitchen sink as if they were present, their …
Haiku
By M. Shayne Bell Fasting for the sick . . . there is no end to talk of the honeydew. White tulips in moonlight . . . bringing water to angels unawares. Checking fences . . . the dog and I walk in green pastures.
“Still Mormon” and “Articles of New Faith”
Or, right-click here to download the audio file: “Still Mormon” and “Articles of New Faith” Still Mormon by Dayna Patterson 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 …
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 …