Wilderness Interface Zone

Sing the song of Cain and Abel:
Cain grew grain.
While Abel
brought flesh to the table.
 
Their lifestyles underscore the fable:
Cain could maintain grain.
But Abel
took food unsustainable.
Then Abel, Cain murdict.
And what is the verdict—
jealousy, heroism,
or the first eco-terrorism?
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Danny Nelson’s “Sustain-Abel” appears in The Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/b10mwx/peculiar-pages/the-fob-bible/) but is making its online debut here at the Wilderness Interface Zone. [...]

Listen to Mark Bennion read “Waters of Mormon”
Amid the tingle of forest and shadows,
you ford through the water
to the sway of its purl and girth,
a surge of billow where air arrives
in speckles of light. The only
distance is the reach of your hand
and the life after petition and promise.
Trees rustle in incandescence
as the crowd’s whisper fades.
You [...]

Listen to “Sorrow and Song” by Mark Bennion
Sariah
That morning you came to me
I saw the lamp arising in your beard,
a flash of iron and fire
wisping in your robes and hair
dreams full in your mouth like jamid
and your gait uneven on the hardest soil.
I thought I knew what you were about to say,
how sweat and sand [...]

by Karen Kelsay
She is frail, her veil of happiness is
replaced in turn by fear, then bewilderment.
Today, she presents a branch before
garden lilies, like a child might coax a parakeet
to perch. Beside the magnolia, where shadows
meet white geraniums she once planted, the caregiver
settles her in a wooden lawn chair. Uneasy beneath
summer’s glare, she retreats to confines [...]

by Karen Kelsay
Tonight, a slow release of summer rain
sweeps through my pear tree. Gentle is the sound,
a metronomic lullaby that rolls
across each limb and patters on the ground.
Outside my room, traversing streamlets run
along the open pane–I try to count them all.
And leaves are soaked a darker green, while buds
appear to peek between the lattice wall.
The [...]

Brown-eyed boy tosses his black head,
Pokes his nose through the corral bars
Sniffing, searching for the apple slice
He knows, he knows I hide behind me.
I laugh, he bobs his head, steps close,
Knickers softly, lowers his head near my face.
He loves me for the apple he smells,
Its dappled red and yellow skin
Hints at dusty summer noons,
Evokes grass [...]

Swallows fly low and fast
Singing of nests in the arena’s rafters.
Heat radiates through wood and sand
Melodius with the voices of young girls,
Odorous with warm sweat of horses,
Pungent with fresh manure, 
Sweet from hay growing in the field.
The mare and the girl work hard
Learning to dance together,
To understand a tug of the rein,
The lean of a body, [...]

Th. writes of this recording, “This is a selection from chapter three of Nephi Anderson’s Dorian (1921), perhaps my favorite Mormon novel. This chapter will be featured in an upcoming series of posts I’m doing on Anderson for Motley Vision. Dorian may be read online. The birds are from Soundsnap.”
For Th.’s–Eric Jepson’s–bio, go here.

Listen to Mark read “Letulogy.”
Uncle Howard,
At sixty, your traces stalk the hollows
of grocery stores from here to Snowflake,
Arizona. A thatch of curly gray hair
shuttles past the cash register, your cow-
milking hands pull a list out of an empty wallet.
You are forever in the next aisle over,
shaking a watermelon, picking at your
mustache, laughing with the manager
over [...]

It seems strange to think that sitting with what’s left of a woman who second-mothered me most summers and for two school years of my life is yoga, but it was the most heart-opening practice I’ve done.
What’s left? A bag of bones, draped with a thin and mottled fabric of skin. Bits and pieces of [...]