ISSUE 97

Fiction
Transportation - Dan Leach
The Departed - Dale Gregory Anderson
Mix Tape - Charles Booth
Delta Foxtrot - Julia Ridley Smith
Hippospongia - Lisa Nikolidakis
Pinched Magnolias - Leigh Camacho Rourks

Poetry
"As Can Happen with an Island" - Mary Crow
"Snow Cover" - M. Ann Hull
"When You Say You Lived in a Trailer" - Katherine Maurer
"Self-Portrait as Apollo and Dionysus" - M. P. Jones IV
"Entanglement Sonnet" - T. J. McLemore
"The Long Dead" - Doug Ramspeck
"Growing Up" - Sierra Golden
"Hawk on a Mile Marker" - L. S. Klatt
"The Good Wife" - A. V. Christie
"Safety Mechanism" - Katie Chaple
"Florida Epithalamium" - Alyse Knorr
"To Loan" - Sophia Galfianakis
"Story That Begins and Ends with Distance" - Jennifer Whitaker
"Of Sweat and Distance" - Shawn Delgado
"Reading Catullus after a First Date" - Rebecca Black
"Meaning in Other Words" - David Kutz-Marks
"Aubade" - Juliana Daugherty

STORY THAT BEGINS AND ENDS WITH DISTANCE
by Jennifer Whitaker

Help, as usual, arrived too late. In jugs slung across
     the backs of cows, the water sloshed and spit itself out,

the daughter tugging and hustling the animals
     flameward up the hill. By the time she reached it,

the house lay in charring heaps, the trees
     hissing like blown-out wicks. The daughter knew

she should've burnt too
     and spent the soot-stained afternoon

watching herself in a reckoning blaze---
     bound up in the curtains, her fingers fretting hot cloth,

holding a melting plastic pail
     twisted like a wrung bird's neck,

chaining herself up in the dim attic.
     And oh the savage heat of it all---

But let her rest now. Let her lie down in the ash
     and shut her eyes. Let her always wish the house

back to burning---when the portraits still held
     a familiar flaming hand or eye, when smoke rose

into the air like new blooms, when a door,
     smoldering but whole, was still there to be opened.