Segullah Journal

The other day my eight-year-old son, Matt, approached me in the kitchen. “Mom, I just realized something that’s freaking me out,” he said with a slightly furrowed brow.
I was intrigued. “Oh yeah? What did you just realize?” His eyes widened. “I’m alive!” he announced. “I mean, I’m living. It’s so freaky!”
I smiled, remembering my own [...]

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 a mason [...]

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 just Sunday School, but tenfold—
the lines of faith and [...]

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 to [...]

The fathers think of soccer
as the usual battlefield.
They expect to see warriors
where little girls were.
From beside the sweet crushed grass
by the equator of the field
where they watch their own daughters
hesitate, lend a hand
to another who is down,
and hear, Oh, sorry! No, YOU go ahead!
rise like doves from the din of the game,
they holler,
Get it! Get [...]

I LOVE MY BODY . But I don’t always like it, which is how I once found myself sitting in the church ladies’ room after sacrament meeting, ankles bound together by spandex. Because of my occasional dislike of my plus-size thighs and muffin top, I had stuffed myself into a pair of Spanx bike shorts [...]

Uriah’s wife
Tresses unbound
Stepped unwise wet
Too open to sky.
Did she know?
Was she flattered by the attention?
Favored or frightened?
The loneliness of a soldier’s too frequent
Absence abated.
Lulled by earth-power
Did she walk reluctant or
Grasp with arms open
To have her name forever
Braided with tragedy?
Elaine Rumsey Wagner has a bachelor’s in math from BYU and a master’s in math from California [...]

For my father, gone seven years now
My father, inches away on my couch,
sinks his body into cushions where he stays
to slow me down with conversations.
Rippling syllables, staccato-like words,
round his soft ears as he pretends to bend
around my life and understand. He sees me,
his only daughter with two daughters of my own.
My body shaped from his, [...]

someday i will stand
barefoot beneath a blue sky and i will
feel you separated from me by
only a thin layer of skin and membrane and
you will be me but not at all me
and someday you will run to me with
muddy hands and
pull on my shirt and
lay your head in that warm place between
my neck and my [...]

Your spirit escaped in two deep sighs
like air hissed from a balloon;
and, no longer confined,
it filters through the house
dusting everything with your stilled presence.
Voices compel me beyond our converged time,
past the lingering smell of your cologne,
past your words, ah, dearest, your tender words
as they turn to whispers.
I contemplate the lonely moon, not quite full,
caught in [...]

When I was in the eighth grade, I wanted my yellow skin to turn white. I wished for my coarse black hair to change into long golden locks and my slanted brown eyes to turn round and blue. I yearned to become an all- American girl with freckles on her cheeks and a last name [...]

Film Review
During an early scene in the documentary, Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, Darius Aidan Gray sums up the line he’s walked since he joined the LDS Church in the early sixties, years before he was eligible to hold the priesthood: “I am a proud black man … yet I embraced the [...]

I first got to know Margaret Blair Young—writer, BYU writing instructor, and co-creator of the documentary Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons—in the fall of 1996, when I was a student at BYU’s London study abroad program. Back then, I knew Margaret as “Sister Young,” wife of Bruce, a Shakespeare professor in charge [...]

Wooden slats subdivide the moon,
slice light into almost even strips.
Thick eyelashes sweep the stillness
of lines cast across your sleeping face.
Light stripes you, reveals you in fractions—
closed eyes, mouth, scar from your first shave.
Lines of light tremble in the thunder of a passing train.
You sleep on, undisturbed.
After one sacred day and night,
my restlessness answers your snores.
I [...]

DADDY WAS OUR CHILDHOOD HERO.
Mom said he looked like Van Johnson, but the six of us kids just thought he was handsome. He smelled like Old Spice, and when he scooped us up in his arms, his tweed coat was always just the right amount of scratchy. I was sure he was a much better [...]

For Gram
It’s been a summertime of solace
like I’ve had before, soaking
up the warmth of your
bright soul and listening
to your yarns and ponderings.
I’ve filled myself to overflowing
with your fresh perspective,
born of ice cream through the alleyway and
days with only soap of raging lye
and learning not to cater though you cherish.
With company along soon, we pull out
the [...]

Silver lines snake up my belly
and my daughter claims them
with childlike pride and I’ve
spent a few rounds
flat on the floor, unresponsive as
nobody’s business, so why should
I feel on the less-than side of the
catwalk?
Skin-deep seems a little underrated
as I try and button up and
cannot seem to fit myself—
except with my eyes closed—
into anything but
less-than, almost, tired
day-to-day-ness [...]

SOME THINGS I HOPE are true:1. That people are basically good.2. That frozen yogurt is as healthy as regular.3. That Amy P. has forgiven me for failing to stand up for her the day Trevor and Sam made fun of her on the playground, next to the red tunnel slide.
I sift the past and [...]

“I DON’T HAVE A boyfriend anymore,” I heard my seven-year-old daughter say as I hung my clothes in my closet.
It was the end of a long day, and in my exhaustion I was inclined to chuckle, then send her off to bed, when something inside whispered the importance of not brushing her off. I asked [...]

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 Sunday,
as calm as calm in being carried [...]

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 leave work, come home, & find & [...]

My leaves a series of prayers,
fitted jointly together,
equidistant, lifted up unto the Most High—
Bulbous, maybe,
but bound about by a delicate green,
enclosing a crisp yet mild heart—
Single-rooted in the dark earth,
thick with its secrets,
deep in the thought of growing.
Ellen Kartchner Gregory was born and raised in southeastern Arizona. She now lives with her husband and their [...]

AN UNPLANNED PREGNANCY in 1976 forever changed the course of my life. I was twenty years old, serving in the United States Army, and unprepared for the responsibility of parenthood.
At first, denial gave me sanctuary. The tests were wrong. My cycle was off. Things like this didn’t happen to women with so many dreams [...]

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 sobbed, [...]