Poetry Winter 2018 fiction all issues
whitespacefiller
Cover Elena Koycheva
Bryce Emley
Asking Father What’s at the End
& other poems
AJ Powell
Butterfly-minded
& other poems
Faith Shearin
Biology
& other poems
Claire Van Winkle
Admitting
& other poems
Sarah W. Bartlett
Summer Cycles
& other poems
Nooshin Ghanbari
Vincent
& other poems
Meli Broderick Eaton
The Afterlives of Leaves
& other poems
Jeddie Sophronius
Refugees
& other poems
Paula Bonnell
In Winter, By Rail
& other poems
Addison Van Auken Waters
Girls
& other poems
Daniel Sinderson
Hallelujah
& other poems
Andrew Allport
All Nature Will Fable
& other poems
Marte Stuart
What an Insult Time Is
& other poems
Matthew Parsons
My Father as an Inuit Hunter
& other poems
Emily Bauer
Gently, Gently
& other poems
Bruce Marsland
A once lovelorn bard’s final journey
& other poems
Beatrix Bondor
Night Makers
& other poems
Isabella Skovira
Lawless Conservation
& other poems
Juan Pablo González
Colombia, 1928
& other poems
Molly Pines
The Pillbug
& other poems
Jamie Marie
On the Lake
& other poems
William A. Greenfield
If You Show Me Yours
& other poems
Bill Newby
Tuesdays at The Seagate's Atlantic Grille
& other poems
Elder Gideon
Male Initiation Rites
& other poems
Joel Holland
Dear Gi-Gi
& other poems
Martha R. Jones
How Lewis Carroll Met Edgar Allan Poe
& other poems
Nooshin Ghanbari
Holy War
after Gholson’s “Border: Mirage Wire”
We fight after Sainte-Chapelle.
(When I break
away from my father
there is
a moment of peace. Notre Dame: a moment
of prayer. The rose window
is my new horizon. Fractured, refractured,
refracted.)
Outside the cathedral, gelato
drips sticky down one hand
in roads of orange and pink.
Vincent
after Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows & The Harvest
Crows crowd the horizon
Bleeding onto the canvas
In curves of inky black—
In a scythe, in a comma
Indicating a pause and
A procession, though not
Quite an ending—
In a Rorschach test that
Reads where will you go
From here, there is nowhere
To go from here.
Home is on a different
Horizon.
Across the way, a farmer
Burrows about in the foliage
In that insistent way that
Little clouds grow on trees.
Every ladder he has ever owned
Leads nowhere. Up, not away.
And yellow—
My god, there is so much yellow.
Blue
Hands to ears,
I can hear the bass of
my heart pounding.
There is a terror up here,
this state of looming above.
The water rearranges itself
in an act of God—
ripples outward—a pause—
then a great scrambling
to what it once was.
(Blue. It was once
and always will be the purest
blue I have ever seen.)
And you, superimposed
onto the blue,
onto the syntax
of the Cornwall horizon—
you, swathed in black
like a bruise, rearranging.
Light Rail Elegy
after Tarfia Faizullah
We held each other’s hands
but did not promise not to let go.
In Amsterdam, they let go.
Girl unmoored, girl shivering,
unfamiliar city spinning. Tram
shadows lengthen, recede.
Their blue and white bodies
could offer up shelter, reprieve,
but not tonight.
No one knows where home is
tonight. Girl unfeeling, girl alone.
Overhead, the moon winks,
extinguishes its flame.
Nooshin Ghanbari
received her B.A. in English and Plan II Honors from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was awarded the Board of Regents’ Outstanding Student Award in Arts and Humanities for excellence in poetry. Her work can be found in WILDNESS, The Ekphrastic Review, Apricity Magazine, and elsewhere both nationally and internationally. Nooshin currently lives in Austin, Texas, where she works as an AmeriCorps English literacy tutor in low-income elementary schools.