Dialogue Summer 2011 issue has some WIZards

Coming soon to a mailbox (or computer) near you: Dialogue’s environmental issue.   Several Wilderness Interface Zone contributors are included therein–congratulations, friends! Frequent WIZ contributor Steven Peck guest edited this issue.

Table of contents:

Page      Author      Title
Mary Toscano      Front Cover
Inside Cover, Title Page
v      Edwin Firmage, Jr.      Letters
1      Steven L. Peck      Why Nature Matters: A Special Issue of Dialogue on Mormonism and the Environment
6      George B. Handley      Faith and the Ethics of Climate Change
36      Craig D. Galli      Enoch’s Vision and Gaia: An LDS Perspective on Environmental Stewardship
57      Bryan V. Wallis      Flexibility in the Ecology of Ideas: Revelatory Religion and the Environment
67      Jason M. Brown      Whither Environmental Theology
87      Bart H. Welling      “The Blood of Every Beast”: Mormonism and the Question of the Animal
118      Mary Toscano      A Perch, A Foothold, A Float
119      Patricia Gunter Karamesines      Why Joseph Went to the Woods: Rootstock for LDS Literary Nature Writers
134      Adam S. Miller      Recompense
143      Ron Madson      Grandpa’s Hat
148      Sarah Dunster      Gaius
150      Harlow Soderborg Clark      Easter Sermons
152      Jon Ogden      Seasonal Ritual
153      Jonathon Penny      Winterscape: Prairie
154      Karen Kelsay      Mother Willow
155      Sandra Skouson      Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother
156      Mary Toscano      The Tightrope Walker
157      Hugo Olaiz      The Birth of Tragedy
161      David G. Pace      American Trinity
177      Benjamin E. Park      Image and Reality in the Utah Zion
180      Polly Aird      Not Just Buchanan’s Blunder
190      Rob Fergus      Scry Me a River
196      Mary Toscano      Wherever He May Go
197      Peter L. McMurray      This Little Light of Ours: Ecologies of Revelation

Can’t wait to get my copy.     I’m very happy to see so many WIZards’ work appearing in the issue, including poems from WIZ’s 2010 Spring Poetry Runoff.

Only complaint: The cover girl or boy polar bear is cute, but I would have put hummingbirds up front.

Just sayin’.

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from “Flying in a confined space” by P. G. Karamesines

In my dream, people mill at a fair, trying things they’ve never before done.   There’s horseback riding on flashy steeds and archery with brightly fletched arrows.  

At the fair’s farthermost edge, wings rest upon the green.   Their colors €”kite colors €”catch at me.   I cross the field whispering, I’ve always wanted to try this!   An attendant helps me strap into the hang-glider.   I snap helmet and goggles in place and cast myself to the wind.

Well, it turns out I’m a natural.   Within me wakes the Aufklarung of flight, of orientation with the horizon and fearlessness in the face of movement ungrounded.   I spin course by stars I cannot see and trust in winds I do not control.   Over the green I soar, in accord with a finely drawn yet constantly changing map in my blood.   I both follow and make the map as I go.

The Peach

by P. G. Karamesines

Blake’s angel, for all his winks and nods,
Wouldn’t have it, though it hangs for having:
Drop of down and blush quavering on the rim
Of ripeness, playing at a fall.

Pendant at the tip of a branch astray
From the greater fruited spray
Where sister peaches cluster meekly
Beneath green custom, this one sweet dangle
Trespasses air my side the fence
Where sunlight fires its skin and any breeze
May dance it.

My neighbor who set the tree as start
Is a man of strict authority, armed, invested,
An officer of our active legion laws.
He knows where all the lines are drawn,
Where fences stand, where right leaves wrong,
And keeping his faith good is wise.
Although this juicy prodigal does seem
To trail a gray gulf, he may better know,  
And so the peach appears to plump and glow
With consequence, a nectareous world
Ripening on a branch of orchard heaven
Under scrutiny from many angels’ eyes.

Taking such creature to tongue suggests
That becoming as a god by fell choice:
Will birthing, her first cry, Desire;
Light, on which the eye opens suddenly,
That infant slit of lid permitting
The flash from good and evil springing apart
To change the eye forever; then, vision:
Probability, lively, everywhere at once,
Refiguring the garden, reforming
Every place the eye alights each time;
Gleams of possibility sparking like drops
Of dew, infinite, engorged with sudden sun
As far as the eye dares see €”to the stars €”
And, clinging to skin, so wet and cool,
Instant thoughts of nakedness
Blush the body and Will seeks clothing,
Her prior choicelessness seeming comfort now,
If unfitting, and inaccessible as the opened womb.

Such first physics infusing All and Now,
Poised to go at breath, I too partake.   So:

Day by day shall the peach hang unmolested.
With its toys of luster it shall bob and sway
Till summer drops its sun, till it is swept
From splendor by timeliness or wind,
Or till he whose lawful peach it is
Decides its fate by his own hand.

________________________________________________

Published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Fall 2005): 178.   “The Peach” won Dialogue’s €œBest of the Year Award € in poetry for that year.