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
Faith Shearin
Old Woman Arrested for Teaching 65 Cats to Steal
after the headline in the World News Daily
I’m still trying to imagine how she did it.
Maybe she used costume jewelry
to instruct them, served tuna
each time they carried a necklace or ring
in their mouths, as a mother might carry
a kitten? They were her pets
but they worked for her, as thieves,
balanced outside unsuspecting
neighbors’ windows on feet as quiet
as desire. She was an old widow
in Ohio, the sky low and gray,
and she was lonely in her flat ranch home
where her felines began to multiply, their
hunger like her own. She taught them
to bring her what was shiny—pocket watches,
earrings, diamonds—from a suburb
where things went missing
when someone closed their eyes in front
of a television set, or stepped
outside to get the mail: whiskers
against bureaus, velvet ears twitching
in the evening shadows.
Early Lab Mice
Robert Koch hung a curtain between the place
where he treated patients and the lab where
he began growing anthrax in a cow’s eyeball.
While his wife was upstairs, marinating
a roast, he remained in the basement,
dissecting an infected garden rabbit,
its ear under his microscope.
Robert drew whatever he observed so
the pages of his notebooks filled with
sketches of rod-shaped bacteria;
he noted how anthrax could be
active or passive, revived by temperature
or moisture, and he remembered the mystery
of a sheep eating from a spring field,
blood gushing from its nose.
Robert set mousetraps in the horse barn,
and when his daughter, Gertrud, was given
white mice as pets he took a few downstairs;
he told his wife to turn away all but the sickest patients
and went on working by lantern light,
his cultures growing over a low flame; I imagine
how Gertrud’s mice watched Koch
from cages and jars, with haunted
pink eyes, balanced on hind legs,
their tails naked behind them,
sensing danger, discovery.
When The World Was Flat
It was possible to drift off the edge,
white sails billowing into eternity,
the earth sometimes in the shape
of a box, sometimes
like a dinner plate. You may
have read about the four corners
guarded by angels who held
the winds; once, we floated on air,
or rested on the backs of elephants
which stood on a sea turtle
swimming in an infinite sea.
When the earth was flat it had
a primordial tree at its axis, and the sky
was a canopy, and life ended
at the horizon, in the place
where clouds fattened,
growing round.
Laika, Before Space
Stolen from the streets of Moscow,
Laika was a dog trained for space
by living in a cage; in photos
her ears bend forward, as if listening,
and she wears a flight harness; she stands
in the cockpit of Sputnik 2: the satellite which
never meant to bring her home.
I have read that Laika weighed
eleven pounds, that she lived
on her own for at least one winter,
each day dark and narrow, snow
in her fur. One scientist took her
home to play with his children before
she was launched into the burning panic
of her final hours and I imagine
Laika in the back yard of her last November
chasing a ball that collided
with a fence: ice dripping from the eaves,
frozen earth, her breath floating.
Biology
My daughter’s textbooks bring it back,
and her notes on a chalkboard where cells
go on dividing, mitosis and photosynthesis
exactly as I left them all those years ago,
the fetal pigs with their eyes closed,
dreaming of birth. An aquarium bubbles
in the corner and my lab partner has lost
her notebook in which she has been drawing
anthrax and babies who cry like cats
because of a deletion in the short arm
of chromosome 5, babies who won’t live
long enough to learn about prophase
or anaphase, and now the teacher is leaned over
a microscope, explaining the vast
universe we cannot see: viruses, dust mites
in our pillows, time, the biology room itself
which stands in my imagination, at the edge
of a white forest in Michigan, 1985.
Faith Shearin
’s books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Moving the Piano, Telling the Bees, Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), and Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press). Her work has been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.