This is my second time moving to Cleveland. The fi rst time I was two (we left three years later).

In the photographs my hair is long until the gum-andscissors episode. I recently found my childhood home from the four-way stop before our block, that almost-home moment. I remember riding my tricycle around the block, and about half way thinking I would never make it back. My elderly neighbor grew tomatoes. He told me about the sheep that came at night to nibble off his hair.

Once, I fell to the bottom of a friend’s pool and sat there looking at everything shimmer shimmer, until a teenage girl, all bubbles and motion, came down to get me. I wonder why I didn’t swim.

Every day the Whiskey Island mailbox fi lls with wonderings, wanderings. It is my pleasure to bring you this double issue, all feathers, boxes, bones. One theme in this issue is time.

Jesse Dunlap’s story moves backwards through a night. Poetry contest winner Mindi Kirchner writes about time: in choosing the poem, judge Denise Duhamel says, “'In Medias Res’” is a philosophical ars poetica, a contemplation on ‘middles,’ a view of a life through fl ashback and flashforward. This poem leaps from singsong to ‘ex-everything,’ with stunning and exact imagery, such as ‘a hole in my mouth/where words should be.’ I trust this poet to take me on the journey.”

In choosing Lisa Sharon’s short story, fi ction judge Karen Joy Fowler says, “The finalists here represented a wide variety of techniques and voices, from spare and poetic to profuse and digressive, from sad to comic, from sincere to ironic. There were things that impressed me in each of these pieces and things I enjoyed in each of these approaches. But I chose ‘The Stag’ for its delicate imagery, the naturalness of its structure, and the wonderful sympathy
the writer showed for the characters.”

This issue is also about fl esh: Carolyn Furnish’s “The Meat Place,” Sara
Dailey’s cannibals, Jessica Jewell’s bear on a spit, Christian Gerard’s character imagining legs wrapped around him like a tortilla. It is about “Shaking Bill by the Neck,” and “Don’t Get Any Stupid Ideas.”

Thank you to our submitters, to judges Denise Duhamel and Karen Joy Fowler, to editors Amy Bracken Sparks and Travis Hessman, to Dan Lenhart, Rita Grabowski, Michael Dumanis, Michael Broida, Steve Thomas, interns and readers for keeping things humming, and to CSU for funding and support.

This was so much fun, we’re going to do it again next year. We’ll be back on schedule with two single issues, and I hope you will subscribe. Writers and readers – they just go together.

—Karen

Issue #54:

Issue #55:

Joel Allegretti Da Vinci’s Joseph Cornell Box H.L. Hix Shawabty Box of Ditamenpaankh Feathered Panel B.J. Best Bird Dissection: Blue Jay Louis E. Bourgeois The Mansion Sarah J. Sloat Curtains Ingrid Wears Bangs God Have Pity on the Smell of Gasoline Deborah Poe Barium (Ba) Simmons B. Buntin Flare Christopher Barnes Mothballed Richard Bailey The Man I Shot is Dead Nancy Burke Seasons Nick Carbó Mal de la Tete Aubade for a Married Woman Baiser Moi Amy Casey Blogrubble New 2 Electricalize New 1 Karen Vaughn Edible Prayers Ava C. Cipri “There is no blue without yellow, and without orange” Carl Peterson How it will be built up. Allan Douglass Coleman Core Sample Sean Thomas Dougherty Maybe It Was How She Smelled of Laundry Jolie Jesse Dunlap This is the Way That We Belong Denise Duhamel The Last Hurrah I Keep Going Around in Circles AboutLowbat, 2006 Kyle Flak From a Boy, To His Father Amanda Gignac Phone Lines Rachel Contrini Flynn Indelible Jay Hopler The Range of Birds Nigel Jenkins Semicolon Hyphen Inverted Comma Christian Anton Gerard Amarillo, For a Change Peggy Wants a Picket Fence Michael Salinger my wife’s laugh Thomas Dukes Try Me Coyote Walk Up Oakdale Street on Christmas Eve Reviews Virginia Konchan “Modern Life” by Mattea Harvey: Inextricably F*#&ed – and Lovin’ It Jay Robinson Varied Tones: David Lawrence’s Lane Changes Pamela R. Anderson Review: An Almost Pure Empty Walking by Tryfon Tolides

Poetry Contest Winner Mindi Kirchner In Medias Res Fiction Contest Winner Lisa J. Sharon The Stag Jeffrey Skinner You Need a Subject for the Sun To Rise Matthew S. Colglazier Portrait of a Marriage Nighthawks James Henschen Syrup Eric Anderson My First Funeral Benjamin S. Grossberg The Space Traveler and Earth Jonathan Wells His Next Child Judith Brandon Water Table Akiko Koga Barber Heather Charley A meeting place for our shared but fractured memory Jim Fuess Blue and Purple Sara Dailey Cannibals Usually Dine Alone Carolyn Furnish The Meat Place Jessica Jewell A Bear for the Day of the Dead The Grass Widow Blas Falconer What Any of it Meant Shannon Robinson Secondhand Body Jason Bredle Mass Apology Karen Hildebrand Softball Game at the Church Picnic Deborah Baker Caput Medusae Josiah Bancroft Shaking Bill by the Neck Wayne Miller Dismantling the Scarecrow Kathy Davis Weeding C. Prudence Arceneaux Discover Thomas Brian Osatchoff Woyend Elton Glaser Thanksgiving Plus One Stephen Lloyd Webber Gondola Christian Anton Gerard Synecdoche Phyllis Carol Agins Technicolor Megan Bohigian Sweeping: el lógico de la escoba, à los desaparecidos de Guatemala Harry Bauld Sunday Morning Magic James Allen Hall My Father Dreams I Am the Bringer of Death Joshua Marie Wilkinson A Brief History of the Trapdoor Dan Murphy gelatin print (lost, rewritten) Laura Hogan A Human Sign Becky Kennedy The Breadbox Jericho Brown Autobiography John Panza Don’t Get Any Stupid Ideas