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
Juan Pablo González
The Tempest
Another abandoned thought
submits to a ruthless windstorm.
This cruel gale I have created
to make ideas prove their worth.
If all my little miscarriages
were somehow to have lived,
I could have painted the world,
and vanquished my own grey.
Colombia, 1928
Waves.
The rocks.
The sea spray.
A friendly breeze.
And up the river,
where countries go to die,
the red in the flag spills o’er,
the blue and the yellow subside.
As the river mourns the death on its shores,
the violence borne by telegrams,
the derelict land where it flows,
shuns the cries of its children.
Carry this blood downstream,
O, Magdalena,
’til it dissolves
in the sea.
Washed by
waves.
Colombia, 2018
I remember the last day
before we returned.
The surf caressing your feet,
the wet sand between our toes
Two cliffs stood guard
to that unpolluted beach.
And the rustling palm trees
stood guard to us.
And we both danced with the sea,
with the tumbling from the waves,
as they rocked us from below
and turned us on our heads.
An ocean filled with you and me,
grew both angrier and tenderer.
Its silent, chaotic melancholy
upon the eyes of a dying emperor.
I thought about my certainties,
how they’re out of my control.
The ones I’d like to have.
The ones I’m proud to hold.
How I wished to spend my life
conjuring images and words.
Round them up with sounds
to make mementos of the world.
There are no lines upon the land
and no limits on the sea.
My mind is taller than the Earth
and wider than myself.
Hidden waterfront,
eternal eventide.
And all the centuries that converged there
to where you and I went to hide.
Bucket
Sometimes it rains.
Once it rained when the sun was out,
and all the minute drops refracted the sunlight.
A cloud of diamond shrapnel floating in the sky.
Gleaming reproductions of the colours of the world.
Sometimes the sky is clear.
And I run outside, looking overhead.
For all that I fear is running to find out
there are not enough clouds to make it rain
and not enough life to write about.
Juan Pablo González
is a journalist, musician, writer and designer from Bogotá, Colombia, born in 1995.