Zari Panosian
Zari Panosian is the fiction editor for Issue 8. She is a junior at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University where she is pursuing concurrent degrees in European History and English (Creative Writing). Her one-act play, Late, was selected as part of the Arizona Women's Theatre Company's Pandora Playwriting Festival and the Pandora Showcase in 2010. In addition to her passion for writing, Zari has aspirations to attend law school upon her graduation in 2013. This is her first semester at Superstition Review.
Religion
the cave, sacred before churches and candles before velvet and choirboys
that great unlit mouth where once we skulked in wine-like dark
our own throats aching for water for rain for rain and more rain
for green for wet for that watery holy mark of favor
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witness! water from scorched skies washing our faces the green-world returning
because we asked because we sang our skyward hosannas
melting a hard God's heart, so Be the Cause we sang, be the done
right thing this praising this magic this mystic word must be marked
and placed in a box in an ark so we can name it and build it a temple
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do you remember singing praises when the rains came when the children stopped
dying how we dipped them drenched them filled their eyes
and ears with the clear sweet broth of heaven
so much later the cathedrals the choir stalls we covered our heads
and took water not from the river but from the stony
man-made font where we held our living babies and with a dripping finger
we marked them
Art
all imagery is ambiguous - like the phone at 3 a.m. when half-sleep
chains the beast to the rose and the inner theater ignites
reminding you that this is the hour the owl came out of when even God
eye-balling the casket felt a heaviness in his limbs
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outside the concert hall thunder - or is the percussionist just nervous
as the conductor lifts his baton and the girl in the balcony
leans into rapture her heaving bodice setting Jack loose on London's greasy
streets seeking prey and release and where like the girl
he leans into the hot taunting pulse the stitching ripping
Biology
memory's an actor who misses her cues knocking things
from lobe to lobe inventing scenes as if she knows
what's happened what's happening
but cognition's a form of silence my eyes staring
straight ahead as I'm nailed to biology's breaking wheel
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the neurons the musculature the dendrites the synapses
the intricacies of the ankle the cave of the skull
and the inner ear's semi-circular canal the cochlea
its curving beauty made it easy to confuse vertigo
with epiphany to imagine my life without this unwinding
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the adepts with their mantras confuse my efforts
to quantify to calibrate to distinguish fate
from blastocytoma they wag dark tongues their teeth clacking
as I try to fathom the seizure the cancer the soul
the end that strong box a sliver of clavicle stuck in the lock