Segullah Journal

2009 Poetry Contest Honorable Mention Charles picks figs for breakfast. Hand stretches to tree, shoulders stoop, flannel sleeve pulls back, exposes a mottled arm creased by years. I take the bowl of dark rubies. He says he’s learning when to pick figs. If green and firm, skin tight, the meat is not ready. Wait. When [...]

2009 Poetry Contest First Place July 26, 2007 Provo Temple, Utah   “In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.” Ephesians 2:22    These animal skin coverings feel soaked from floating  in sorrow’s brine, and we groan  under their weight, groan  towing tent and tackle up the foothills  [...]

2009 Poetry Contest Honorable Mention You have come to me From the clutter of gumball machines, A bright trinket dispensed Into my waiting hand. Made in a place where no one can pronounce your names, molded, pressed out by the hundreds. Can you still be beneficent when no hand has carved you, painted your face, [...]

2009 Heather Campbell Personal Essay Contest Winner MY PARENTS DANCED in the kitchen. Dad would come home from work and sweep Mom into a fluid fox-trot on the brown and gold linoleum. The man could dance. He was smooth—transformed from the owlish, bespectacled engineer-high-councilor-family-fix-it-man into, well, Fred Astaire. Their graceful everyday duet enchanted me. Like [...]

2009 Heather Campbell Personal Essay Contest Honorable Mention The biggest class I ever took at BYU had 3,000 students. We met in a huge auditorium with lighting and sound technicians to help the instructor go over the basics of American history. The room was dark, and runners carried a microphone to students with comments. The [...]

2009 Poetry Contest Second Place —for Billie Jeanne Underwood    Just stepped outside when no one was watching,  screen door still swinging. . .   How could you be gone, truly?—  I think of you like Prometheus—  come from a dark place & carrying fire,  coming straight for us—  nimble feet, dark hair, dark eyes, [...]

In the valley between bone and bone  where my children stretched awake   and where a silent, sudden roll, a tumbling,  would slide into comfort again,  their movements, their proximity   made me safe.    So, when, in a recent nightmare, I glanced over  and my toddler was sinking through murky water  a boat’s length [...]

2008 heather campbell essay contest honorable mention I. I FIRST MET THE Rostov region of southern Russia as a missionary at twenty-two. I spent a year and a half wandering the streets, talking to strangers about Jesus: to the woman from Poland, her glasses tied around her head, as she pushed pieces of watermelon into [...]

First Place, Poetry Contest For K Opinions vary as we wait to hear if her health is billed clean as spic-n-span, and in my bumbling fearful heartbreak I find myself as useless in consolation as I imagine; no more, no less … I loathe this mortal question. Standing bald and ashen, still she teaches not [...]

honorable mention, heather campbell essay contest THE FUNERALS WERE THREE weeks apart. My gentle parents had been thrown into a harried frenzy to bury my father’s father, my mother’s mother, and their own primal sense of security within the shallow space of two fast Sundays. Like everyone else in the family, I had been relieved [...]

2008 poetry contestsecond place It’s the kiss of nervous wing against dirt, dragging against gravel; it’s a cry, a feigned weakness leading the predator away; it’s a gift for facing danger: her liver enlarged, cancer rampant, pain not sometimes but always, & always tired; her gaunt eyes— the way she looked at us all that [...]

2008 poetry contest third place There you were— where even shadows smelled of creosote & sage, four feet below mesquite roots, & dry drift in salt cedar; erosion carved above you, & around you; warm sand pouring through your fingers, across your legs … And, somehow—below that dark horizon, in rain-charged air— she felt to [...]

2008 heather campbell essay contest winner WE MADE A SCENE at preschool last week, which is odd for us. But there we were for the whole line of cars to see— hysterical daughter and guilt-ridden mother. Mei’s face was pressed to my chest and her tears soaked my shirt. I felt her breath as she [...]

Co-Winner, Heather Campbell Personal Essay Contest A STEALTH SNOWFALL has coated the world overnight and muted the usual traffic noises, allowing us to sleep in a bit too late on a Sunday morning. My three sons bring news of the snow as they pile into our bed and climb over us to open the blinds. We [...]

Honorable Mention, Heather Campbell Personal Essay Contest I AM IMMEDIATELY SUSPICIOUS about the origins of the mountain of produce my sister has left for me on the countertop. It is too much food, and from the packaging I know it cost too much money. A quick look at the labels tells me the harvest is from the [...]

Co‑Winner, Heather Campbell Personal Essay Contest EVERY MORNING and every evening, I walk alone through the darkened halls of one of the most famous museums in the world. The cultural collection here is one of the world’s largest, and millions of visitors walk these halls each year in the daylight hours. Every day, they press up [...]

First Place Winner, Poetry Contest Luke 1:25 Thus hath the Lord dealt with me in the days wherein he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men. He wrote, “My prayer was heard!” I thought,       Which one? Can faithless prayer be answered? Or do old prayers carry old faith’s fervency, like remnant [...]

Honorable Mention, Poetry Contest I peered into a puddle and saw the sky, as if I had lain on the pavement and looked up through the spreading fingers of the trees. Gazing into the sheen of the sidewalk, I watched the heavens and saw them tremble at my passing. Emily Summerhays lives in New York [...]

Honorable Mention, Poetry Contest And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. (Gen. 3:20) I. Laurel tossed, we leave ourselves lost as we are the wanton world our choice. We ate to know, we ache now to be known as we are. Moving, a glance over our slumped [...]

Honorable Mention, Poetry Contest Do not steal my fire and ice, make null my trial, void it with another name than pain. The cut of a blade opening to bright red is revelation, not in later epiphany, but present sense, the now of living, now of lava coursing down my throat to scorch my inside [...]

Honorable Mention, Poetry Contest she was (young) driving safely home after work and realized (strange) that she was going (instead of East) West, and slowed the car into a parking (unused)-lot to turn around. Finding (somehow) herself on the wrong (the passenger) side of the car and starting to move back she, hearing mother’s voice, [...]

Honorable Mention, Heather Campbell Personal Essay Contest THERE ARE THREE ACTUAL REFERENCES to me on Google. The first reference to Emily Milner, me, is on page six. Before that I wade through pages of references to not-me Emily Milners: genealogy charts, a talented high-school violinist, a devout Catholic from Georgia, a fourth-year physics major. The [...]

2006 Heather Campbell Personal Essay Contest Winner WHAT DID I HAVE TO TEACH THEM? Before me, I counted nineteen faces: a new crop of BYU honors students. At the last place I taught a writing course, the students needed me. They needed me to show them how to craft thesis statements, to fix split infinitives, [...]

Poetry Contest Honorable Mention I curl myself around warm food in my belly— ancient, first and only comfort. I’m supposed to be rejoicing, sending my son into fields of white all ready to harvest. On sky blue sheets my heart tumbles out of my sickled chest, sends hope and sorrow to heaven where the sower [...]

Poetry Contest 3rd Place Winner Come to the temple of silence, away from sounds of weary want, from the grinding, the tearing of time. Come away from shouting daylight and find me in the stillness of your afternoon; your ordinary afternoon. Put down your swords, your plowshares; take up my burden, my quiet, easy burden. [...]

Poetry Contest 2nd Place Winner (to my husband, on the 22nd anniversary of our December marriage in the Manti temple) We sail the vein: Perforated, gray southbound highway Down From dawn’s perch We approach, Splaying this languid stage of sagebrush       In two Vast contours, undulating, Old rocky chronology seeping left to right, [...]

Weapons falling: swords, spears, arrows, knives, metal clanking metal, final clashes before great clods (warm earth-smelling loam) covered up the brightness of all our crimson sins. All my dear ones kneeling, open-palmed, bowing to greet death, praising God, they died, and died, and died. Almost I fell too, until my eyes met those behind the [...]

Poetry Contest Honorable Mention Because one man thought pity no disgrace (Perhaps he glimpsed my utter weariness Or saw the worry in my Joseph’s face), We have this welcome haven—humble, yes, But elevated by that kindliness Into a palace fit to house a king. We shelter here as unexpected guests Of sleepy beasts, and yet [...]

First Place Winner, Poetry Contest To be a woman is to be heavy: to know the elements, one by one, to return to the earth which first gave life, to feel its weight, and to come forth again. A maiden is a naiad: light as air in elusive flame. Her heart is bound to nothing [...]

IT IS LOOKING AT A BRITISH GRAVESTONE, of all things, that makes me think the question. The gravestone is old and covered with some sort of green fungus. There are many people listed on the stone, though their carved names have been degraded by elemental wrath. They have been dead so long that my question seems [...]