Steven M. Sloan | May 22, 2008
Black candles
Made from slaughtered infants’ fat
Grace the points of a pentagram
Writ large in virgins’ blood;
They light-up occult inscriptions
And the twisted face
That mouths their sounds
In the eldritch exclamations
Of spells that had lain dead
For who knows how many years
‘Til this purposeless & empty fool
Had flailed about & struck upon
An evil path to tread
In a spate of catastrophic [...]
Steven M. Sloan | May 19, 2008
Fear & shivers wrack my frame
Every year about this time,
When dour thoughts afflict my mind,
And heart, and so my gentle rhyme.
Most everything is dying here,
For fall has come to close the year.
Summer diversions & summer-time games
Distract us until summer’s gone,
When all feel older, for we see
Another winter’s coming on.
And fruits of life are taken in
Which [...]
Kenneth E. Nahigian | May 16, 2008
We are the pattern-seers, the dream-chasers. We see castles in clouds and omens in our tea. Why not? Imagine a primitive human, mistaking a shrub for a leopard—he might detour to avoid it, be inconvenienced, and live to have children. But what of one mistaking a leopard for a shrub? He is food. So it [...]
Steven M. Sloan | May 14, 2008
Or Sally-Port For Slaughter?
The Cold War was over
And gates for peace swung wide,
Counter to things innate, –
Bursts of religious hate, –
That now well-up inside
To produce fresh slaughter.
Craig Cooley | May 8, 2008
I’ve worked as a letter-carrier for many years, and had just started a new delivery route at the Post Office. I was going through the usual learning curve. It’s not easy remembering 400-600 new names, not to mention which houses have dogs, which customers will constantly complain, and which ones will want to visit with [...]
Marilyn Westfall | May 6, 2008
As I photograph the Schleicher County Courthouse in Eldorado, a voice behind me says, “Nice building, huh? It’s the same kind of limestone that the polygamists used for their temple.”
Surprised, I turn to see a man maybe in his late forties, five feet away but coming closer, and I ask him, “Have you been to [...]
Marilyn Westfall | May 4, 2008
FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs likely succeeded his father Rulon T. Jeffs in 2002; this information is disputed, and Warren recently claimed that he was not the true prophet, but rather had been deceived by evil powers into believing this heresy. The Eldorado Success newspaper, however, has tracked both the development of the YFZ compound and [...]
Marilyn Westfall | May 2, 2008
The temple of the Yearning for Zion (YFZ) compound gleams, pure and white, in the sunshine of West Texas. I pull over on the side of Rudd Road, a bumpy asphalt strip that divides ranch land and homes, some as simple as singlewide trailers where laundry hangs on clotheslines beneath which pass young goats and [...]
