Righteousness Express: Riding the PG&R
March 27, 2018A new litmus test of righteousness has swept the church: the shunning of all R rated and the de facto acceptance of all PG and PG-13 movies. I don’t like litmus tests. They are too…
DiaBLOGue
Sanctuaries
March 27, 2018It’s been ten weeks since Liz (my mother) came to collect me from the islands and pack me back to Michigan. She wanted me to tally my losses and get on with things. Liz has…
A Good Sign
March 27, 2018Bobbie wants to marry me again. Fourteen months now I’ve been pointing out the kids, our wedding pictures, our marriage certificate. Gosh, I even show him the mail—”Mr. and Mrs. Robert Franklin,” right there on…
Wolves
March 27, 2018When he was seventeen, David Thatcher Williams and his cousin Cleon, who was also seventeen, hopped a freight in the Provo yards to start a trip to Washington, D.C., to visit David’s Aunt Doris, his…
Vicarious
March 27, 2018For and in behalf of those dead
before God’s love could smother
them. I enter the font and take a baptism.
Buried in the temple’s basement, twelve
garlanded oxen balance the precarious
From Three Jacks
March 27, 2018Sunrise, Friday, November, 22,1963, not yet but about to be one ugly day in U.S. history, and standing over there about to climb into the family Nova was my dad, Jack, the man suffering—in words…
Havesu
March 27, 2018He watches Elain’s buttocks, the tan shorts browned at the seat, as she walks briskly ahead of him on the narrow trail. Her dirty orange day pack bounces on her back, the leaky canteen a…
Liahona
March 27, 2018After he was let go, Dad’s job
was changing the rolls on those
little spindles in the bathrooms.
Now and at the Hour of Our Death
March 27, 2018Luis strained his ears, watching bare jacaranda branches twitch in silhouette against the bedroom wall. The bedroom window was sliding up. It was not a dream. A human shadow was nearly indivisible from the web…
Christian Spinning
March 27, 2018My son who is blue-eyed and sensitive
thinks he’s alone in his room
where his music bumps and heaves.
I stand unseen at the door which is open