Second Place Maureen Tolman Flannery Where Time Faltered Outside Mantua, Italy, archeologists unearthed a pair of human skeletons from the Neolithic period locked in embrace. Of course they were lovers. It was land that would come to be Italy. Complicit sun peered through poplars and warmed suggestive paths among not-yet-domesticated olive trees. They had raced away from their day’s tasks— his hunting the four-point stag, hers gathering the plumpest blackberries. Needing no fermented juice to feel intoxicated, she maneuvered through barbed rose vines which future millennia would coax into bearing grapes and met him there, in a grove of trees, bird busy and humming with summer air. They whispered and sang in imitation of the nightingale that discovered their love and announced it to observant clouds. Late into the morning, lying entwined, they ate scrub kumquats off each other’s tongues. He combed her long dark locks with parted fingers as his lips followed the golden trough from her shoulder blades to where he licked salt at the two shallow pools between her hips. She waded waist-deep into his eyes and retreated to the beach of sky so she could breathe again. Time, confounded by arrangement of their limbs, could find neither its bearings nor its stride. As desire wound a wild vine around their adoration, bound them to that indentation in the grass, Time, unable to pass by, drowsed, yawned and settled in beside them for a brief, five-thousand-year sleep. _ ___ _ Table of Contents _ Allison Joseph _ Maureen Tolman Flannery _ Carissa DiGiovanni _ Dion N. Farquhar _ Willa Granger _ Sandra Soli _ Gerald R. Wheeler _ Michele Battiste _ Radames Ortiz _ Brady Rhoades _ Jennifer Weathers _ Helen Wickes _ Allen Gee _ Michelle Panik O'Neill _ Susana Chavez-Silverman _ Susana Chavez-Silverman _ Liz Dolan _ Author Bios