Issue 04 Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor I’ve had a thought as this issue has begun taking shape over the past few months that I’ve held myself back from saying. I didn’t want to seem reductive, or to insult any of our current or former contributors or staff members and, probably more so than that, I didn’t want to be repetitive. But the thought has kept repeating and is now firmly a part of my inner conversation, my silent series of anxieties and excited superlatives surrounding this, the fourth issue of Apogee. I’ll reveal it to you now if you promise you’ll let me say the same thing next issue: though chronologically this is Issue 04, to me it feels like our first issue. You may remember many of us saying this same thing prior to the release of Issue 03, our first issue outside of the umbrella of a university. And though I didn’t say it at the time, I was also having thoughts in this vein way back when we were putting together Issue 02, the first issue for which I served as Literary Editor. But for me to understand this recurring thought and perhaps get to the heart of why...
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Old Maid by Ann Dewitt

By Ann DeWitt He’s fifty when he starts with the suspected trapeze dancers, fixtures in the night riding a large red tricycle. Don’t yet know about the World War II jumpsuit or the guy in chains in back sucking the salt off all the peanuts. I didn’t put him in the cage. He jumped right in. Locked the door himself. “Here we are,” he said when we first met. I said, “Let me down.” We were just two small twigs then, riding a red tricycle, getting high on pizza in the back of a pickup, jet-setting in Ohio, bass fishing with his father. “Just look,” he said from where we stood on the pier. “And let me push you.” I first put him in the birdcage when he was fifty, when he started pinning lint balls to the back of his mother’s head and taking a break, telling his Grandmother he’d like to give her a ride on the back of his tricycle before pushing off down the hill, before she’d had her shower. I hung the birdcage in my window. “Give me a shake,” he said, perched in the back of the cage. “Shake it out.” “Give me anything.”...
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