Michael Hicks

Letters to the Editor

True Religion

When you’re young you think “widow” is a misprint for “window.”
Then the tarp of age gets pulled over you and the words drift apart.
There is a cleanness to good marriage that is like the Renaissance.
It is a force of beauty that tramples mere love. When the blood rushes

The Agreement

After the staredown, saliva gathering in their mouths,
cotton swelling in his, Daniel invited the lions 
out for drinks and a late supper.

The Four Stanzas of the Apocalypse

The sky has fasted in the desert 
forty thousand years. 
Now it’s caught a glimpse 
of barley fields and orange groves: 
the table the world sets for winter. 

Understudies for Angels | Megan Sanborn Jones, Contemporary Mormon Pageantry: Seeking After the Dead

The cover photo startles us into the book’s theme: two tribes, ghosts and mortals, staring off in the same direction. Beyond that cover we take a trek through Mormonism’s pageantry—not the pageantry of temple rituals…

Notes on Brigham Young’s Aesthetics

“If there is anything virtuous, lovely . . . we seek after these things.” Granted. But loveliness by what criteria? We in the Church often presume a common aesthetic; or when conflicts in judgment arise—whether…

Poetic Borrowing in Early Mormonism

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it seems, has had little ^ use for poetry that cannot be sung. The chief place of verse has always been the hymnal, and not without reason:…

David

This blade of stone 
cuts the grass 
to the quick. 

Joseph Smith, Sr., Dreams of His Namesake

Vermont, Autumn 1805 

And the boy, the milky angel said, 
will be like the wild rain 
that shatters the crops and spins the brittle stalks 
end upon end.

Rebaptism: A Manual

When the first letter comes, 
a quiet verdict, 
water sheds its sense: 
coastlines stiffen, 

The Statue of Brigham Young at South Temple and Main, Salt Lake City

The cupping hand cradles the winds 
that whir like crickets 
beneath the swoop of traffic lamps. 
The legs like stumps of pillars 

Family Tree

Adam: The wind hissed in the branches, 
green tongues 
whispering 
a secret I could 
never peel open. 

Faith Healing

And there she was, Kathryn Kuhlman* strolling the stage at the Civic,
parting a sea of applause, her gown like an angel that got away,
so pure it might have been empty but for the Holy Ghost preening
in her body as she paced the floral proscenium, lifting her hands
in a sign language I knew only God understood. 

Elder Price Superstar | The Book of Mormon (Broadway musical)

I’ll never forget the first time I heard my mother swear. I was in my thirties and had finally decided to talk to her about her second husband, whom she’d married when I was eleven, divorced two years later, and about whom, as if by a silent contract, we never spoke. “So tell me what was going on in that marriage,” I said to her. She bit her lip, paused, then said, “It was really shitty.” And that was it. This woman from whose mouth I’d never heard a “hell” or a “damn,” a woman who read her Daily Light devotional every morning, listened all day to Christian radio, and kept a pocket-size New Testament in her glove compartment, had now, deliberately and with great care, spoken a word I could never imagine escaping her lips.

My Mother Tongues

You can’t forget your first time. Mine was in the back of a beige ’68 VW bus, which I’d just bought from my mom’s boyfriend. I was taking Annie home from an Assemblies of God…

Singing in the Easter Choir beside My Enemy

A sustained tone, our conductor says, 
must narrate our belief: begin, develop, 
then patiently subside. That’s what she 
learned in the Welsh choirs of her 

Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection

I should keep a journal. If I did I could look up what year this happened. Or exactly why I drove to Ed’s house and knocked on his door. Or what time it was when…

Guest Editor’s Introduction

Kristine Haglund gave me a gift. This issue is the long thank you note.

She had asked me from time to time to write something on music for Dialogue. Or take part in a panel discussion on music for the journal. Or do anything on music, since she loves the art and its place in our faith and I have been a kind of go-to guy on that for years.