This segment is from a longer piece, Plato’s Alcove, which won an honorable mention in Torrey House Press’s 2011 Creative Non-Fiction Contest. You can read the entire entry here. Plato’s Alcove is about my first trip to the desert back in 1982.
In the desert one day I met Coyote, the Trickster-God. We greeted each [...]
As we walk—side by side—down the long sloping trail, we pass gray trees and black igneous boulders peppering the otherwise white, sedimentary landscape. The earth is a mirror reflecting the hot yellow sun that has so recently removed winter’s snow. I point out traces of vanished streams; you find lizard footprints delicately decorating their sandy [...]
The emu lives in wooded and open country, costal and inland, across Australia. It is the second largest bird in the world. Its ancestor, the Dromornithid, lived at the time of the dinosaurs. Originally three species of emu roamed the land, but only one survives today; the other [...]
The larks trilled their cries that
Nested in my ears in birdsong.
I saw the thaw of winter had begun.
Soon spring would rush in on her
Pastel heels bringing forth blooms.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
To read Linda’s bio and enjoy more of her verse on WIZ go here, here, and here.
the hand of winter stretched out
his grey gloves and poured snow
out of his pitcher it fell upon the
world in cold numbing waves it
washed away all the colors of fall —
it beat back my favorite lilies into
the hand of white dust like people
are prone to beat one another into
the dust for a sense of self worth. [...]
I watched as the white of snow
starched the earth clean of sins —
like the Savior washed me white
by his blood. It seemed a stark
contrast of his shedding white for
red and the earth shedding scarlet
for white, but I think He favors the
irony just as much as we do. I stood
in the bone numbing cold of winter,
letting [...]
In the tar-like black sky
structures float like ghosts
through the illumination from bulbs
hovering like flying saucers over
the road. No heavenly
luminaries accompany me on this lonely journey.
Only those cones of light brighten the route ahead.
Nevertheless, I must persist.
I am a modern Hebrew
fleeing the Egypt of the office, escaping to
the Promised Land of the field. There,
as I stand [...]
I meet a young couple in the canyon. A dog in their company tells me more about them than they guess. I see a piñon pine tree alight with fall sunshine. As I exit the canyon, I discover a prying eye. This is another long and the last installment in this series but it isn’t [...]
This multiple-part series is from a longer work-in-progress I’ve begun that recounts my experiences in Recapture Canyon in southeast Utah. Woven throughout the longer narrative are my ideas about language’s part in evolution, culture, and relationship–including what language reveals about and how it affects the ways we treat with people who live with what I [...]
Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poetry, edited by frequent WIZ contributor Tyler Chadwick, made its debut at 2011 end in impressive style. Tyler reports that Fire in the Pasture has “risen as high as #2 in both Hot New Anthologies and Hot New Inspirational & Religious and #12 in Hot New Poetry.” The [...]