POEM THAT INSPIRED THE COVER ART: “WAR” BY HANANAH ZAHEER
Sometimes we work with artists on cover art tailored to the issue. For Shō No. 9, we gave our cover artist Nara Allsop a selection of poems we’d accepted. He chose to interpret Hananah Zaheer’s poem “War.”
War
When I was young, I liked to play with guns, too. Plastic, wood, paper, and my index finger pointed. I ran across the back lawn, crushing dandelions, falling into the blades of grass to squint my eyes at ladybugs. Don’t aim at living things, my father would say. Once he caught me bending behind a bush, my right hand in my left, index finger extended. He lowered my arm, don’t aim. I thought I saw the reflection of a passing bird in his eyes or maybe rain, or maybe he was sad. Though he was a soldier and had been in a war, and I was sure he had held many guns before. I imagined my hands were just like his, the line of our thumbs turning metal around the grip, when they squared up to a barrel. It’s not even real, I objected. Only the ground, he said. Never, ever, at anyone. He felt out of reach then, and dangerous, knowing something I didn’t know.
AUDIO
About this Poem: I have been considering war for a very long time, having grown up intimately acquainted with its consequences, and even much more so over the last three years. This poem is part of a larger exercise on childhood and exile and grief as reflected between the natural world and the Self, and my attempt to understand one’s (my) inheritance of, and relationship with, power, violence and vulnerability.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Cover Art: Past Looking, 2026. 11″ x 14″, Mixed Media.
My intention was to present a visual metaphor for the poem “War” by Hananah Zaheer.
On a reflecting vertical pool of water, or perhaps tears suggested by the father’s sadness at the memory of war, float two feminine hands. Those of the speaker. One points towards the empty sky, a place of reflection, and the other towards the earth, groundedness. The void is alleviated by the presence of nature, ladybugs and dandelions, whose leaves form wings suggestive of the bird in the father’s eye and its flight away from the captured moment of the poem and the pain of remote danger.
—Nara Allsop, 2026
Hananah Zaheer is the author of Lovebirds (Bull City Press, 2021). Other recent work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Cut, Best Small Fictions, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. You can find her @hananahzaheer or at www.hananahzaheer.com.