Bourbon Penn is home to the surreal, the odd, and the Weird. Issue 17 offers seven stories of fear and love: The day her ex-husband gets out of prison, Luisa watches little green songbirds crawl from the grave of her horse, Octotillo; Deep within the Machine, two Workers flee the Bone Men together, trying to find an escape to the surface; A couple of maintenance cyborgs take drugs on the moon and settle in with shotguns to wait for the killer bugs; While searching for a mysterious group of poets, a student finds himself being haunted by their words and pulled into their immaterial world; The fractal polydactyl has fingers that branch out all the way into the subatomic, and he reaches out to touch someone, anyone; When grieving mothers cannot overcome the pain of losing a child, they turn to the therapy machine and the rituals it prescribes; Ravenous mermaids have migrated from the deep sea and into the local ponds and waterways where the local children play. Stories from Bourbon Penn have been reprinted in several best-of anthologies. New fiction in this issue by Kali Wallace, George Edwards Murray, Dan Stintzi, Charles Wilkinson, Josh Pearce, Hamdy Elgammal, and Dawn Sperber.