By Kate Romney
On her deathbed she strains not to leave the heavinessof the sky, which is part of a heaviness made upof once thick thighs that thundered in two tones after darkwhen she was only a daughterwho danced by lifting the lips of her flowered, flowing skirts,it is also made up of the heaviness of guttural grunts, like …
By Wendy Weitzel
The steps ahead of me rose steep and narrow, ascending straight to heaven. “The Steps of Penitence,” our Egyptian guide, Ahmad explained with the grin of one who had the climbing prowess of a dromedary. “Seven-hundred-and-fifty steps until you reach the summit. Only the truly penitent will succeed.” For two hours, we had zigzagged up …
By Sherilyn Stevenson
In this issue, Prose serves up a literary version of a well-balanced meal with the kind of variety we crave. First, Olivia Grover’s dystopian short story, “Of Secrets and Truth,” introduces a young shero who discovers a decades-kept secret sure to shape the future for all. In the creative non-fiction category, Cherie Pedersen’s braided essay, …
By Kate Romney
The lake laps the lips of the shore where I sitaway from baby who’s with my mother up the hilland I hear in this place the changes in my namefrom lover to motherlike something gobbled into something else. I hear fish mouths muddling mossy mud,flopping frogs, the sound of the sky pulling metowards itself and …
By Samantha Hastings
I woke up without Ma’s familiar warmth by my side, nor her saw-like snore filling my ears. Blinking, I realized that the sun had somehow risen. I sat up, sore all over from sleeping in the wagon with what was left of our earthly possessions: a butter churn, a pan, a Book of Mormon, and …
By Melonie Cannon
Do silent stones ache for light?buried deep under moss and pitch, heavy dirt and grasswaiting for someone to dig, finger-clench in a perfect fit,and carry them toward a new creation-to be their legs, their hands, their momentum,to become like man and move? plucking them up to rattle in a pocket,be a holy talisman, the border …
By Shari Crall
Last year my very talented cousin, Laura McCarrey, took on a project to post a photograph every day for a year. Near the same time, Segullah’s co-editor, Sherilyn Fuhriman, recounted in the 2021-2022 Winter Journal being asked when the last time she had created something had been and that same journal featured poems created by …
By Teresa Bruce
Over the weekend, not at my house, I dumped 24 bottles of fruit juice down the drain and tossed a couple of pounds of brown rice into the trash. The juice expired 12 and 13 years ago. The bag of rice was opened more than a decade before the juices’ “best by” dates. (We won’t …
By Karen Austin
As we read the four gospels of the New Testament, we observe Jesus issuing a call to people who subsequently must work out what it means to be a follower of Christ. There were no buildings with set floor plans, no organization charts, no handbook, and no elaborate leadership hierarchy. The saints of Galilee met …
By Jessie Christensen
Editorial When I first read a draft of Elizabeth Cranford Garcia’s essay “An Apology for Speculation”, my mind turned to words I associated with “speculation”: spectacular, perspective, speculum, spectacles. Over the past few centuries the term has taken on negative connotations that associate it with straying into unwanted territory—‘speculating’ on ideas much like a ‘speculator’ …