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 …
Tag: poetry
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 …
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 …
Fledglings
by Dayna Patterson Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). She is the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre, a former managing editor of Bellingham Review, poetry editor for Exponent II, and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon …
Words Matter: Lines Written in a Pew
By Anita Tanner This is how religion kills language: it mounts a thought, drives and whips it to a frenzied destination high on a mountain peak— the ultimate, unquestioned authority of words, unaware how riding wreaks language, bleeds wounds spurred by desire here on the peak of performance. How facile, this peak, …
Flesh, Language, Sacrament: Three Meditations on the Communal Meal
By Tyler Chadwick Tyler Chadwick lives in Ogden, Utah with his wife, Jess, and their four daughters. He is the editor of Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets, co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry, and author of Field Notes on Language and Kinship. Hope-in the (Communal) Body …
Kenosis
from the Greek meaning “self-emptying” By Anita Tanner “If you could turn your heart into a cowstall, Christ would be born again on earth.” —Angelius Silestus Old wood, manure, and cattle urine in milky darkness— only one bare bulb at the far end of the barn, each stall cave-dark, heavy brown where cows …
Former Mormons Catechize their Kids
By Dayna Patterson In the beginning was— Chaos. Cyclone. Sky. In the beginning was— Death. Hunger. The Void. A thought. A Word. Matter unorganized. A Big Bang. An expanding universe. Heavy elements formed in supernovan heat. A lotus on a lake of milk. A mass of water humming Nun. Fire of Muspell and ice …
Poems by L. N. Allen
Spaces Needed in the 21st Century a space between writing letters and pressing Send between finishing an entrée and ordering dessert between falling in love and having sex between desiring and acquiring between growing older and being old between sitting quietly and praying . . . even better, a double space, an interval, a biblical selah. …
Pentecost
By Robert A. Rees On a recent trip to Peru for the Liahona Children’s Foundation, I was asked to address the Peruvian Congress on the subject of children’s malnutrition. Although I don’t speak Spanish, my colleague from the Foundation, Alberto Puertas, is Peruvian and beautifully bilingual, and so the members of the Congress heard …