Maisie Prayed
April 2, 2018Did I do the right thing? Maisie Clay is forty-three years old and here she is, sitting on a tombstone in a cemetery in the middle of the night. She is here because she wants…
DiaBLOGue
Soft Sculpture
April 2, 2018I sink into a beanbag chair
shaped like a giant ear
but changing shape to fit my rear
As Translated Correctly: The Inspiration and Innovation of the Eighth Article of Faith
April 2, 2018The epitome of essential LDS beliefs, now known as the Articles of Faith, that Joseph Smith included in his letter to the editor of the Chicago Demo crat, John Wentworth, in 1842, has been admired…
New York City Rain
April 2, 2018WEDNESDAY—ALL MY LUGGAGE IS SOAKED and I tore the sleeve of my brand new overcoat in the subway station. Elder Sessions told me not to look away if I noticed someone staring. “Just stare them…
Basic Training
April 2, 2018We were like filings, lifted straight
As though a magnet stiffened up
Our figures like the hair upon
Our closely cropped skulls. But we,
Madeline McQuown, Dale Morgan, and the Great Unfinished Brigham Young Biography
April 2, 2018Shortly after completing The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton in 1967, Fawn M. Brodie wrote to her friend Dale Morgan confessing that she had “been periodically haunted by the desire to do…
She and He: Alternatives
April 2, 2018—Or on summer evenings as the sky
Draws down its light, prodding the question why
They sit in cast-off wicker furniture,
The kids cross-legged as though the lawn made a shore
Embracing the Flesh: In Praise of the Natural Man
April 2, 2018Ten years ago I cut to pieces another human being. Using scalpel, electric bone saw and tweezers, and blunt dissection, I slowly removed the flesh from her body over a six-month period. I was never arrested, nor charged with any crime. In fact, I was encouraged by the society around me. It was considered part of the learning process.
A “Meeting of the Brethren”: The Discovery of Official Minutes of a 1902 Meeting of the First Presidency and Twelve Apostles
April 2, 2018Documenting the daily is difficult. Women save wedding dresses, not house dresses. Men polish the handles of hand-braided buggy whips, but toss worn-out hammer handles into the fire. Nineteenth-century Mor mons were historically among the…
Lectures on Death at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
April 2, 2018The ranger stoops to toss a stick away
and points to a narrow hole dug in the mud.
“Snakes,” she says, “are plentiful this year;
there’s some bubonic plague in rodents here.”