poetry on the ‘fridge door
March 21, 2018my mother is madly licking
at the languid red peach,
screaming at life and
the rust crush of death.
DiaBLOGue
Showshoe Song
March 21, 2018flung unsifted from bluest above
snow casts light on me in sparks
Behold all ye that kindle fire
That compass yourselves about with sparks
Borax
March 21, 2018The sand that blows along the bed
of the Amargosa waves and shirrs
and cleans as well as water. It scours
the tatters left uneaten by birds,
Where We Lay Our Scene
March 21, 2018Her ticket is at will-call. She needs no help finding their seats, but Tom repeatedly cranes his neck to check the doors at the back of the hall. He likes it when she emerges from…
The Nature of Comets
March 21, 2018We found the remains just below the embankment of an antediluvian oxbow. She had been lying there a long time, before the Cayuse and Lewis and Clark and the Grand Coulee Dam and long before…
Changing Faiths Gave My Sons Hope
March 21, 2018On this year’s Christmas letter to friends and family, I left out the fact that our two sons have joined another church. I prefer to avoid receiving sympathetic messages such as, “Don’t be upset. The…
My Mission Decision
March 21, 2018October 1954. I am age nineteen and in Clark’s Barbershop with Lloyd for his weekly duck’s butt haircut. He’s reading the Salt Lake Tribune and 1 am turning magazine pages. A coupon says, “Play a guitar in six weeks.” I nudge Lloyd, “My convertible needs a guitar player.”
The 1948 Secret Marriage of Louis J. Barlow: Origins of FLDS Placement Marriage
March 21, 2018Dialogue 40.1 (Spring 2007): 83–136
Watson explains how the secret marriage of Louis J. Barlow to a 15-year-old girl caused a major rift among fundamentalists. Today’s fundamentalist members are still experiencing the effects of that marriage.
Loose in the Stacks: A Half-Century with the Utah War and Its Legacy
March 21, 2018With the Utah War’s sesquicentennial commemoration now underway, it is appropriate to reexamine that campaign’s origins, conduct, significance, and historiography. This article’s purpose is to stimulate such probing. I hope to do so through the story of my own research and conclusions about the war over the past half-century—one-third of the period since President James Buchanan and Governor Brigham Young came into armed conflict during 1857-58.
The Theology of Desire
March 21, 2018A friend who is a soprano once related a story to me of a rime when she was accompanied by a male pianist. They worked together on the piece for some weeks; and finally, when they performed, the ecstatic release, the sense of the flowing together of their spirits, was, in her words, “like making love.”