Mark D. Bennion

Mark D. Bennion {[email protected]} has worked as a faculty member in the English Department of Brigham Young University–Idaho since 2000. His poems have appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including Aethlon, BYU Studies Quarterly, The Comstock Review, The Cresset, and Iodine Poetry Journal. Last year his second collection of poems—Forsythia—was published by Aldrich Press. He and his wife, Kristine, are the parents of five children.

Articles

Sestina of the Martyrdom

On the long tether of a day in June
Beyond the Zion swamps, the prisoned palms
Of four men opened toward a promised land.
And yet, below the shadows of limestone
Joseph thought again, I am going
Like a lamb to the slaughter.

Sorrow and Song

That morning you came to me
I saw the lamp arising in your beard,
a flash of solder and fire
wisping in your robes and hair

My Brother’s Bed

To wake up remembering his empty bed
is serene as touching the walls of a cave,
is to believe you can keep that Friday in mind
and heft Galilee on your back.

My Brother Was Buried Wearing a Red Jacket

Walking up to the coffin
(a little larger than a viola case),
I see his jacket lying stiff
as baseball card gum.

Compass

In the simmer and slow furnace
of morning, the ball sits on the ground
rotund as pomegranate, a misshapen

Caught Up

John the Beloved considers the Rapture

Word buckler, chary tribe,
inured lamb,

Sober Child

How many times had he dashed past me?
He’d run and run, climb onto the thick
stone walls, stretch his arms into the ribs
of morning light, shake his head,

Denying | Leap | Someone I Used to Know

In his body’s haze and swelter,
In the furrow of appetite,
The Son of Man holds out his hand
To stem the stream of lush requests,

Awakening

His thumb and forefinger raised in declaratives
Draw initial notice, but it’s the hands of those
Near him that pull me back—something almost festive
Yet closer to restrained, in the bowed, worn widow