Thirty thirteen-year-olds stormed into my room. They chattered and waved their arms, oblivious, as usual, to my between-class presence and observance of their passion. “Man, he’s such a jerk,” Jared hissed to his huddled friends…
LDS church standards require that sexual relations be confined to marriage. While the world in general seems to have grown more tolerant of premarital sex, church standards have remained stringent. Sermons, articles, and auxiliary lessons…
Going down to the cellar
a child awakens to tendrils
of winter vegetables
that elongate like white worms.
The U.S. Women’s Movement of the 1970s focused on several issues, with passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) at the forefront. In the middle of this battle stood Sonia Johnson, a Ph.D. in education,…
We had only cameras
and yearning, but the wind rasped
stone like a hot tongue
and cameras and yearning
A few years ago a member of our Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2nd Ward bishopric and his wife made their first journey across the United States. Born and reared in Japan, they were anxious to see the…
During the winter of 1994 a man I represented was taken to a small room in Huntsville, Texas, strapped to a gurney, and his life was taken from him by strangers in the name of…
I arrived in San Diego the day before Christmas to visit my mother and to clean out her garage. I am the fourth of seven children, most of whom live much farther away than L.A.…
These bodies
look like they were pancake mix
that, when poured on the skillet,
turned out to look sort of human.
Preliminary Considerations: Counting Wives Some readers may regard the accompanying chart of Joseph Smith’s plural wives as overly conservative. Fawn Brodie counted forty-eight wives in her biography of Joseph Smith; more recently D. Michael Quinn…