Hidden Flame

Lindsay Remee Ahl

I spent my childhood in a cave, outside glowing snow, inside Byzantine paintings,ceiling bats, everything drawn like a breath. When I wanted to leave, I lit myself on fire; it didn’t hurt—I listened to the flames the way an owl listens to air currents; I was ash in the wide sky.Musty bison on cave walls dream vast grasslands, but listen: I was in the cave, and thenI was everywhere.

Feature Date

January 15, 2019

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Lindsay Remee Ahl has work published in The Georgia Review, Hotel Amerika, and Barrow Street. She was a Fletcher Pratt Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for her novel, Desire. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

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The Southern Review

Summer 2018

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Louisiana State University

Co-Editor & Poetry Editor
Jessica Faust

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The Southern Review is one of the nation’s premiere literary journals. Hailed by Time as “superior to any other journal in the English language,” we have made literary history since our founding in 1935. We publish a diverse array of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by the country’s—and the world’s—most respected contemporary writers.

“The Southern Review … represents everything that is good in the world of literary publication. Their dedication to aesthetic quality has been the gold standard in literary publication for over seventy-five years.”
—James Lee Burke

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