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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


Writer's Site

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.

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