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
Bryce Emley
Inheriting
—for Erin
Maybe we ask too much of the stars.
They must be tired from the weight of our small lonelinesses,
tired of being cast in our stories
when all they want is to show us the shape of the night.
They must know there’s so much space between them.
They must know how we talk of their dying,
how they’re already gone before they reach us,
and yet all they do is reach with arms so dim
they can’t even press the shadows from our figures,
the way we can’t stop ourselves
from becoming our fathers,
who didn’t know how to keep from hurting us.
It’s good to be loved so much
we can hurt the people we love.
It’s good to be always ending, and so needed, for now.
It’s good to tell someone
Here, and here, and here
as you touch the parts of your face you want to be kissed
and feel warmth from their lips
like light from trillions of miles away on your cheek, your temple,
the curve where your jaw meets your neck.
Grief
You don’t feel it. You have it
or you don’t.
No one tells you it’s like that.
They don’t tell you to have it is to feel everything
you’ve always felt
but in new tongues, new colors, new coats
in the same bright, busy country.
They don’t tell you feelings don’t matter,
the way you don’t feel
the bones you carry through the world
until you’re too tired to stand,
all that love you kept sleeping
waiting for the ones who would take it,
all your wondrous youth.
You won’t know it as a feeling.
You’ll know it by a lightness: a gift
of one less thing to be afraid of,
an openness already collecting your breaths,
recurring dream
losing its shape as you describe it
and even now can’t recall,
but know you had it.
You know you have it.
Asking Father What’s at the End of the Darkness
He says I think too much of falling things,
of what comes next.
Lately buzzards have been flying circles in my head,
I’d like to know to what extent we choose
our nightmares. I’m tired
of how things have to end, how everyone we love
are bonfires night has just begun to swallow.
I think this is why he needs God,
why my heart is always playing jackstraw with my ribs.
I’d like to know it will matter if I pray
for him, I believe in God
the way I believe in Icarus and starlight,
in bones waiting at the bottom of the sea.
I think he needs to think I’ll miss him when he’s gone,
ashes sketching wild shapes on the wind.
If I don’t speak it’s because I keep a prayer
lodged in my throat: Make me someone
worth hurting to see.
Bryce Emley
is the author of the chapbook Smoke and Glass (Folded Word, 2018). He works in marketing at the University of New Mexico Press and is Poetry Editor of Raleigh Review. Read more at bryceemley.com.