Poetry Winter 2018 fiction all issues
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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
Jeddie Sophronius
I Memorized the Lord’s Prayer
I memorized the Lord’s Prayer
& with every wrong kingdom I named
I met the teacher’s cane
I raised the Five Pillars of Islam
the night before I kissed a Moslem girl
outside the invisible line of purdah
According to the sacred texts
Krishna is the God of love
& one of us is going to naraka
There was no way an old man from China
could have believed in the God of the Israelites
But what do I know?
—For thine is the kingdom,
In her sick bed, I tell my mother
about Saṃsāra
—& the power, & the glory,
God, she is coughing blood
& insulin
for ever & ever.
Amen.
Please, I don’t want to lose her in heaven
Interlude: Refugees
If I were
a bird,
I’d be too
claustrophobic
to sing.
I’d drown
my wings
long enough
to become
man again.
You can call it
evolution,
except
that it isn’t.
We’ve all
been here before:
singing and drinking
until our lungs
collapse
like buildings
during
an airstrike.
Indiscernible
refugees
die every day
without their names
ever mentioned
in the newspaper.
Children born
of war
die in war.
But why
bother? The work
of God is this:
for every snowflake
that kisses
the ground
a child’s sand angel
gets closer
to getting buried,
and so does
the child.
Somewhere,
a farmer shares
his last cigarette
with a soldier
over a field
of limbs.
Jeddie Sophronius
was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. He received his B.A. in English: Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. His work has been recognized by The Adroit Journal, Fairy Tale Review, Proverse Hong Kong, and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Juked, Vinyl, and elsewhere.