A Mormon literary backcountry where words and place come together.

 

 

 

 

Mi tierra y mi hogar (with translation) by Gabriel Aresti Jr.

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

Déjame que te cuente cómo me compré esta casa
Verás
Habíamos visto ya cuarenta y nueve pisos en dos meses
Algunos vacíos
Otros recién abandonados, con frascos de colonia
Aún expuestos en el baño y un añejo olor a tabaco
En las paredes desconchadas.
Otros seguían repletos de vida, con fotos enmarcadas
Mientras tú intentabas prestar atención a la chica de la inmobiliaria.
Era [...]

A big “Thank you” to Spring Runoff participants

Monday, May 10th, 2010

I would like to thank personally each participant in the 2010 Spring Poetry Runoff Celebration.  You helped make the Runoff a very successful event this year, not just for me but for readers and other participants.  I hope everyone enjoyed the poetry and all-around gathering of talent as much as I did.  The list of [...]

Vote for your favorite Spring Poetry Runoff 2010 poems

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Thanks to great participation, WIZ’s Spring Poetry Runoff Celebration ran halfway through spring.  Now it’s time for followers of and participants in the contest to make their preferences known.  Here at WIZ, we all get to be poetry judges for five days–part of the informal nature of this contest.  But rather than restrict each judge [...]

“Winter Relapse” by Alan Mitchell

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

A solitary hawk beneath
a sky of lavender and gold,
assumed the vantage of a tree
and there reconnaissanced the cold.
Once-melting drifts of speckled snow
grew stiff against the freezing ground.
The humid gusts abandoned hope
and left the air without a sound.
What once was flowing now was tamed;
the rivulets, muddy and curled
lost strength and stream, as puddles became
glass windows to [...]

“The Morning View” by Travis Burnham

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

At five in the morn I gaze upon the Earth
Holding my little one so innocent and mild.
Hoping that I might have a chance
To feel her trails of glory
The midnight rain ended soon,
Leaving clean the outside world
I glanced through a crack to catch a glimpse
Of  Nature’s hallowed view.
Crisp, Clean, Calm the scene lay before my eyes.
Each [...]

“Waiting for Spring” by Karen Kelsay

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

October, what will you bestow? You’ve left
the tulips and long daffodils unborn,
and spreading ferns aloof in darkest glens;
your brown leaves have revealed a scarlet thorn
to snag the frosty mornings. Mallards will
not light upon the weir, and open skies
remove their lightest blue. The fallow rose
is waiting for the spring–and like my eyes,
discolored branches search for green. [...]

“In the Sweet Alone” by Karen Kelsay

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Sitting cross-legged beneath the cherry tree,
wearing her mother’s seed pearl necklace
and a sprig of jasmine on her bodice—
she offers blossoms to a gravestone.
The gilt and gold of late afternoon washes
through shadows. It’s springtime. Unripened
fruit hangs like quiet temple bells between
flowering cylinders of white, and brides
with dark branches. Somewhere in the sweet alone,
silence caps hilltops and [...]

“Spring Outing” by Nani Furse

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Storm in these hills
frays each edge
of symmetry:  shadow-snow
drawn under earth and stone
by threaded rain.
Bone-red willows
banked by sage
tangle cold echoes,
sharing the motion
of water turned wind
in search for transparent green.
_____________________________________________________________
Nani Lii S. Furse is a SAHM, proof that she’s learning textese in an effort to communicate with her teens and young adult children.  She earned a [...]

“Rough Translation” by Lance Larsen

Monday, April 5th, 2010

I slip outside into a corridor of clarity and breeze—
that pinking time when owls home to barns, when bats
fold their hunger into gloves of sleep and cranes
whoop in the morning like freckled boys on stilts.
One body: some days, I swear, one is almost enough.
But today?  I want to climb free of this narcotic dark,
squeeze into [...]

“Like Urban Tumbleweed” by Davey Morrison

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Like urban tumbleweed the
plastic grocery bag blew across the empty
overcast park, green with the whispers of
storm;
we watched it approach, you
nestled into me, silent, from across the
grassy expanse and pavement, with the same
nervous smiling, quiet intrusion any other
stranger might have greeted us–
tipped its rustling head and averted its eyes,
leaving us to our leaves
and our close, closed [...]