Segullah Journal

ON A DAY OF SMELLY LAUNDRY MOUNTAINS, a day when I felt mother-grumpy, my grandma’s letter arrived. She had typed it out and sent copies to all her young-mother granddaughters. I opened it hoping, in a weepy emotional way, for a tender mercy, something to ease my fatigue. The letter did not disappoint. My grandma wrote, [...]

I LOOK LIKE MY SISTER. We’re not identical, mind you; if we stand side by side, you’ll be able to tell us apart. Elaine is two inches taller, for one thing. My hair is more blonde and less thick. She is far less freckled, and my skin is paler. She has the nose I wish I [...]

I CLUTCHED THE METAL sidebar of the hospital bed and dug my nails into the cold steel. My body posed rigidly as each contraction swelled and crashed over me like the surf at high tide. Sweat poured down my back. It left a salty pool above my lip, which I bit to stifle a groan. Bile [...]

Since you were born I’ve never been alone, never will be, standing now at zero on a line that stretches out forever to the right. Always at the edges of my sight you pull at me, your dance a haunting grace. Nevermore I’ll live in just one place: my restless senses stretch like tentacles into [...]

They cut desire into short lengths And fed it to the hungry fires of courage. Long after, when the flames died, Molten gold gleamed in the ashes; They gathered it into bruised palms And handed it to their children And their children’s children.1 “This is what the Lord has been preparing you for,” said the [...]

Harvest When I was younger and could run and not be weary, I would head for the hills and jog upward and onward, leaving the valley behind. My path often wound to an overgrown and forgotten back road connecting two otherwise separate neighborhoods. One cool, summer morning as I took this shortcut, I stopped in [...]

pressed for the sleeping and eating, care of the young and the sleeping and eating, duties of shelter, to keep it clean and warm and lit and locked and live, and all the wordless aspects of errands and urgencies, without details, lacking words, and the sleeping and eating and no time. no time to hold [...]

Sacrifice was numbered in sheep subtracted from flocks. First, young, flawless taken from the ewe’s warmth to altar of rocks, then burned: amber, orange, red. Babies fall through me, birthed to return straight to heaven. My first sucks a sliver-sized thumb and inhales one last breath. My second—bigger, sturdier, passes even faster than his brother. [...]

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 [...]

I DO NOT MOON PEOPLE. I can safely say that I have never, will never, could never, in my entire life, moon anyone. I have absolutely no desire nor inclination to drop my drawers and—well, this is clearly a place to avoid vivid description. So why would I, a woman who would never expose one [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

I HAVE BEEN FEELING UNFRUITFUL. For a long time. My marriage has gone on for over twelve years with no children, despite many repeated, varied fertility treatments with their various levels of physical and emotional trauma. The monthly ups and downs of hope and despair have just about worn me out. My late-thirties feeling of autumn [...]