In the Night by Sarah Dunster

We slumber heavy in the night
so long as hills are bare and white,
and what is real, is pressing. What
can you do but answer. What can
you do but take my jaw in hand
and answer. And what can I, but

know you while night visions press us, hot
in our down blanket. What cannot
be spoken we will speak with night
still resting on us €”your air
on me, and my warm shoulder bare
to you €”real, real as day is light

until we wake in morning’s cold,
when mountains, rimming in the gold
of cresting sun, can no more be
deferred. What can we do but rise.

That I could stop you with my gaze
as you work your task of leaving me.

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Sarah Dunster is wife to one, mother to seven, and an author of fiction and poetry. Her poems have appeared on Wilderness Interface Zone as well as in Victorian Violet Press, Segullah Magazine, Dialogue: Journal of Mormon Thought, and Sunstone Magazine. Her novel Lightning Tree was released by Cedar fort in April of 2012. When she is not writing, Sarah can often be found cleaning, cooking vegetarian meals, holding small people in her lap, or taking long, risky walks after dark, especially in thunderstorms.

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LONNOL Month officially begins!

February need not be
cold, drab march toward spring.
Green through the heart, unchafe the flower;
tune up mind’s fiddle string.

For there is life in life this hour
and dance to dance this day.
The slightest reach of thought gives power
to meet the arms of May.

Let no one thought linger the frost,
or snow befall the mood.
Turning the mind with heart will shower
deep spring’s similitude.

hjerte by Elizabeth Pinborough

if a heart broke once forever would it
not be a dead thing?

yea, a heart is a lively creature, filled
with quiet musings,
subtle thrummings,
murmurous hummings.

aye, she is rapturous and verdant,
swindling common sense
with fictive branches
white with blossoms.

yet, she is the taproot of things,
descending through
the earth warm
with worms, and moist.

nay, she does not die.

(Click image twice to enlarge)

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Elizabeth Pinborough graduated from Yale Divinity School with a Master of Arts degree in religion and literature. She desires to resurrect women’s voices from the past, and through her writing she seeks to create a space for feminist historical and theological exploration. Her poetic journeys include “A Shaker Sister’s Hymnal,” which first appeared in Dialogue and which now appears in Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets. Most recently she collected a series of essays and photographs titled Habits of Being: Mormon Women’s Material Culture, which is being published by Exponent II in spring 2012. Her credo is, “Snails are people, too.”

Old Woman’s Instructions to a Girl in Love

Catch a white mare and bridle her
With an ivy bridle; braid her mane
With marigolds; go in the slender
Light with her to the water tender
Where the fish rise and count the flames.
Free the mare; if she trumpets like a swan,
Say your beloved’s name and pray till dawn.

Mask your body with horsemint; turn
Away from the sun; do not go toward
It all day; do not wash or burn.
Fiddlehead of the hart’s tongue fern €”
Seethe it in milk; eat it from a gourd.
If you meet him keep your body mute.
Pick no flower dove and eat no fruit.