Fairy Tale Review, The Violet Issue

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Author: Kate Bernheimer | Kim Addonizio | Don Mee Choi | Lucy Corin | Tracy Daugherty | Espido Freire | Sarah Hannah | Lily Hoang | Anna Maria Hong | Kim Hyesoon | Toshiya Kamei | Jeffery Levine | Lisa Olstein | David Petruzelli | Natania Rosenfeld | Aurelie Sheehan

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Fairy Tale R eview The Violet Issue

 Editor Kate Bernheimer Assistant Editors Alex Chambers Ivy Grimes Christopher Hellwig Andy Johnson Michael Lee Laurence Ross Undergraduate Editorial Assistants Jesse Holmes Amanda Johnson Manuscript Editor Tara Goedjen Web Editor Brian Oliu Advisory Board Maria Tatar, Harvard University Marina Warner, University of Essex Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota Cover Art (inside frame) Kiki Smith, “Born” courtesy of the artist

Designer J. Johnson, designfarm A co-publication of Fairy Tale Review Press and The University of Alabama Press.


Fairy Tale R eview www.fairytalereview.com Copyright ©2007 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Fairy Tale Review (ISSN: 1556-6153) is an annual copublication of Fairy Tale Review Press and The University of Alabama Press. Subscription rates for 2007 are $20.00 for individuals, $25.00 for institutions, and an additional $8.00 for foreign delivery. Subscription orders and changes of address should be directed to Allie Harper, The University of Alabama Press, Box 870380, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0380. Checks should be made payable to The University of Alabama Press. Fairy Tale Review is devoted to contemporary literary fairy tales and hopes to provide and elegant and innovative venue for writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales. How can fairy tales help us to go where it is we are going, like Jean Cocteau’s magical horse? We hope to discover. Please know that Fairy Tale Review is not devoted to any particular school of writing, but rather to original work that in its very own way is imbued with fairy tales. Fairy Tale Review considers unpublished works of fiction, poetry, drama, screenplay, and non-fiction. At present, art is by solicitation only. Submissions are accepted from May 1 to September 1 each year, and by solicitation. Simultaneous submissions are welcome; as a courtesy, simply let us know if your work is accepted for publication elsewhere. With your manuscript please include a brief cover letter and an SASE, or indication that you would like to hear from us electronically. We do not yet accept electronic submissions. Submissions should be mailed to: The Editor Fairy Tale Review Department of English University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 No portion of Fairy Tale Review may be reprinted without permission. ISBN-10: 0-8173-5498-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-5498-5


In Memoriam Sarah Hannah 1966 – 2007



“Please, what’s that?” asked the princess. “A spindle, my dear,” said the old woman, who hadn’t heard of the fairy’s curse. “May I see?” the princess asked. As she reached out, she cut her finger on the spindle. She fell, unconscious, to the floor. “Help!” called the old woman. All the king’s servants came running. They tried frantically to revive the princess. They put cold linen to her head, ammonia to her nose, rose water on her wrists and brow. Nothing helped. When the king saw her, he knew the curse had come true. He gave order to the maids-in-waiting. Soon the Sleeping Beauty lay in her best dress, in a room all tapestried with gold and silver. The magic sleep increased her beauty. Her cheeks and lips were rosy. The soft sound of her breathing showed she wasn’t dead, but sleeping.

—From “Sleeping Beauty” Translated by Marie Ponsot



Fairy Tale R eview The Violet Issue

 ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS K ate Bernheimer Editor’s Note • 118 “At an early age, children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to enjoy fairy tales,” Andre Breton wrote in 1924. “There are fairy tales to be written for adults,” he continued. “Fairy tales almost blue.” Violet flowers are often described as “almost-blue,” which is how I chose this color; or almost how. K im A ddonizio Snow White: The Huntsman’s Story • 15 I took out my knife and held her head back. She closed her eyes. A deer crossed the clearing, stopped and turned. I thought it watched me, I think it watches me still . . .


Don Mee Choi The Tower • 17 No one spoke to her but she married anyway. She loved her bedroom, her tower. She slept alone on a mattress, covered in Ziploc garbage bags.

Lucy Corin A Woman with a Gardener • 19 I’m with the caterers, a one-time job, a borrowed bow tie, old sneakers I’ve spray lacquered black. It was that or heels. Fifty bucks, four hours.

Tracy Daugherty The Sailor Who Drowned in the Desert • 28 The Sunday service had just ended. Father Thomas had prayed, again, for a budget influx to fix the sanctuary door, which was old and splintered with rusty hinges.

Espido Freire Irlanda: Chapter One • 32 Translated by Toshiya Kamei Sagrario died in May after much suffering. She was buried after a service at the packed church. Many flowers lay at her grave during the first week, but they soon disappeared.


Sarah Hannah Three Poems • 43 Seems like she just keeps running through her woods, Grasping: violet, bramble, thatch, stumped utterly.

Lily Hoang from Changing: A Novella • 48 Mother with her silence listening to Father & he with his hardness & his stubbornness & his anger & Mother pretending calm by caging tongue behind teeth & not speaking & there is no little calmness in our home.

Anna Maria Hong Cin City • 59 In the dumb kingdom of fear and trembling, the person with the see-through slipper knew enough to split before the other one

Kim Hyesoon The Eye of the Cyclone • 60 Translated by Don Mee Choi A poplar tree shakes its wet hair In front of a mental hospital in Ch’ŏngyangni Maybe the night wind is blowing— the wind woven with the crazy birds’ hair


Jeffrey Levine Two Poems • 61 There was a swift, shy, confident, anxious kiss, similar to a first kiss. The delicacy of the first kiss after the resurrection.

Lisa Olstein Four Poems • 66 We are ringed by hills. I’ve taken to burying almost anything that dies—spiders, mice, birds I find in the road. This goes against local custom; here they burn.

David Petruzelli Abandoned House • 70 You heard it so many times you began to believe you were there, and of course you were there, always going inside alone

Natania Rosenfeld The Minder • 71 My minder accompanies me everywhere I go, on errands of tedium and excursions of fun—especially on excursions of fun.


Aurelie Sheehan Small Animal • 74 Sara herself did not know the people throwing the party, but she went to the house in the woods anyway.

Richard Siken Fryderyk Zajac • 78 Gently, gently, with a voluntary kindness, the hand does the work because the world needs to be touched. There is a button, and there is a shoulder, and there is a darkness, and there is something on the other side.

Kieran Suckling Frogs • 86 The suspect was “not your average maggot-looking dope dealer on the corner.” At least that’s what the police say. It was 1994, and he was arrested for possession of bufotenine, a Schedule 1 drug under the California Controlled Substances Act. The drug in question came in the form of four toads—Hanz, Franz, Peter, and Brian— that the suspect intended to smoke.

Lee Upton Three Poems • 93 Even if he was a bull angel, a land whale, a million tumblers of blubber, a horned prevaricator, it took dirty tricks to get him.


Julie Marie Wade Maidenhead • 96 It all begins with Red. She was a good girl, couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, nothing on her mind but an innocent visit to Grandmother’s house. Problem with the child isn’t that she’s vain but that she’s vulnerable—or so the story instructs us to believe.

Contributor Notes • 120 Acknowledgments • 127 Announcement • 128


KIM ADDONIZIO Snow White: The Huntsman’s Story

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I took out my knife and held her head back. She closed her eyes. A deer crossed the clearing, stopped and turned. I thought it watched me, I think it watches me still… I swore an oath: to follow orders, without mercy or pleasure. Even the part you think might have been pleasure— She wasn’t a creamy girl. She wasn’t a girl at all. She was my assignment. When I took the lung and liver they were warm. I brought them bloody in a bag to the queen, who thanked me and mentioned a medal. That night I left my quarters, crouched in the weeds and got sick. Think what you like: that I spared her, that she sang while keeping house for seven little men. Believe in the apple, the glass coffin without its covering flag, where she lay

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as perfectly preserved as Eva Peron until the prince came to carry her away. Of course he didn’t carry her; the servants did. And when they stumbled over a tree stump— if you believe the story—the piece of apple, caught in her throat, popped out, a magical Heimlich. I can see it so clearly now: she sits up, the prince takes her soft little hand, and the evil queen trades her Ferragamos for cast iron sneakers. And I remember my place in the story. I let the girl go into those fabled woods, in winter, while the snow fell around us, white on her black hair, white on her blue Aryan eyes, white on her pretty, open mouth.

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Don Mee Choi The Tower

 No one spoke to her but she married anyway. She loved her bedroom, her tower. She slept alone on a mattress covered in Ziploc garbage bags. Her blue suitcase was packed and ready to go. At her wedding, she’d stayed solemn behind her veil. She gave her husband a ring then let go of his hand. Still no one spoke to her, so she sat next to a photographer and drank her champagne. Later she entered a toilet booth and watched the water swirl, go down, then come up again. She preferred her bedroom where she could lament alone and wipe the dust off her blue suitcase. Her husband was normal and distant. Goodhearted, he liked to fuck. She said to him, “No one speaks to me.” Then she went into her bedroom and locked her dress, the door. That night she laughed while straightening the garbage bags on her mattress. She knew joy,

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she knew Freud. She thought her hands were sleeping. They touched neither man nor woman.

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LUCY CORIN A Woman with a Gardener

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’m with the caterers, a one-time job, a borrowed bow tie, old sneakers I’ve spray lacquered black. It was that or heels. Fifty bucks, four hours. White turned rails swoop up the lawn and curve around the verandah. What’s a verandah? It’s what I think I’m seeing. There’s a funny white statue of a lithe angel holding a lamp at the walkway entrance, and then later, up nearer the house where the stairs start toward the entrance, nothing you could call a stoop, a baby one, what do you call it, a cherub? Like going in reverse, back in time. Next, great lion-headed knockers looking nothing like boobs, I think, annoying myself, scanning for a back entrance, somewhere I must be supposed to be going. There is one. Around back. You go in a door built into a hill and it’s a tunnel left over from slave days. I heard of these somewhere, in a class, maybe, this way to pretend you don’t have slaves, like it’s magic everything is so nice, but this place might be old or it might be replica. It doesn’t look old. What looks old and not dirty? This looks clean, a clean hill of grass, nice trees, a clean door in the hill, and inside, chunky rock walls. It could be a rich crazy lady’s delusional obsession. She could have built it for her demons. I don’t know enough to tell. Either way I feel dumpy and defensive. Inside it’s an underground kitchen and the company is using it to do final prep. Long metal tables fold out from the walls on insectlike legs and people, mostly dropout-looking kids, are lined along it in narrow cook’s hats making piles of dices and squeezing butter into ramekins with pastry bags. Piles of baskets for rolls, buckets of utensils, trays of four kinds of glasses, mounds of grapes, and eight hams pegged with fruit, and platters of strung-up little birds, and supersized crosshatched pies . . . I don’t know anything about food, but I’m for it. “Hi Amy, hi Jacob, hi Tandy, hi Joe.” These are kids I know from other sucky jobs.

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“You should see upstairs,” Becky says. I like Becky and miss her sometimes. She’s holding a cleaver and there’s band-aids around the center three knuckles of her hand. Something is always happening with her. “Go upstairs and check in with Matt. Tell him you’re here. Wait til you see upstairs.” Becky got me the job. I did catering once before, a bar mitzvah with globes of gumballs instead of flowers on the tables. Gumballs all over the floor like marbles as soon as the boys landed. Okay, upstairs. How do I get there? I can’t remember. I’ll tell you what else I don’t remember, is how I know how to say what I saw. But I know. Upstairs first it’s all about chandeliers, then it’s about mosaic tile, then it’s inlaid wood all through the ballroom, marquetry borders, and walls of mirrors in gilt frames surrounded with ornate probably silk wallpaper, and dark carved wooden trim around everything and enormous arching glass doors, window seats lined with tasseled cushions, giant oil paintings of old men and bustled ladies with lace-up dress fronts, tables, tables, tables, with white cloths and centerpieces made from rosebuds and pearl beads. No metal folding chairs at this shindig. All six-tops waiting for six tops. I’m about to throw up from looking when server after server emerges from behind a staircase in a fashion so orderly I cannot believe I will ever blend in. These people who I might, a moment before, have recognized, weave like a mass of ants among the tables, surround them, cover the space, and then disappear in a wave back behind the stairs, leaving six place settings at each table where before there were none. In fact, as I watch, I begin to believe I am watching one person, over and over, as if time is stuttering and indeed there is only one person setting one table. But then somehow the whole place is set and I suspect I’ve seen dozens of servers, maybe hundreds. It feels like hundreds. How does it feel to see a hundred servers? I might have seen hundreds of servers over the plodding course of my idiotic life. But at once they’re not men and not women, and not kids, some of whom I know; they’re elements of the décor swooping in and returning like a living curtain. I go back downstairs. I’m shaking, all the bits of me rattling like they’re strung together or just tossed in one bag. “I don’t know who Matt is,” I tell Becky. She’s there with the cleaver. She might have been one of the servers upstairs, but now she is herself again.

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How will I possibly become one of them? I will stick out. My shoes will chip. I’ll fall. She tells me something. For a moment I remember what she looks like naked. I also remember what she looked like when she said, “I can’t take it anymore!” and I said, “Take what?” and she said, “It! It, it, it!” and started throwing her things around her crappy apartment. She didn’t mean me. She meant everything. I remember she broke this ceramic frog she’d kept from childhood that she had on her dresser and it held her rings in its mouth at night. I can see the blade of her cleaver moving and flashing, just as beyond her I can see other hands on singing tongs and other hands spinning wooden salad bowls that clack like castanets, and even though I know Becky is talking, time shifts—it’s because of memory— and even though I am a terrible server, I feel it: all I have to do is move and I am caught up. So I do, and there I am. I am one in a line of precisely undulating bodies from a long line of long lines, moving up twisting basement stairs that become increasingly shiny as I near the surface, and I am balancing an enormous silver tray of twenty glasses of champagne as if the glasses and the liquid in them are suspended over my palm as weightless as any idea I’ve ever had. I look for Becky; I want to mouth to her how elated I am, how okay I feel, how light I feel, and graceful, but everyone is blurred together and when I try to glance in the mirrors I’m moving past I cannot catch my own image, which bothers me for a moment. But then I see that my free hand is guiding glass after glass onto the tables as I pass with exquisite timing; I never stop moving my feet and yet each guest’s elbow shifts out of the way as I approach and each baubled dandy catches my eye to accept or pass as if we are breathing together, and just as I cannot tell one server from another I cannot tell one guest from another; I simply know as if by rhythm, yes or no, I want, I don’t, or yes, but here, or no, but soon. Their happy noises ring and hover, rumble and soar, and utensils punctuate, and behind me, Becky, or anyone, is slipping them pâté and crudité (what, did I pick this up in construction? did I learn it landscaping?) and golden bouncy bits of fish and vegetables. I’ve glided in figure eights so balanced I’m breathless, I’m elated, I’m gliding back down the stairs, and although the damp basement walls remain distant, somewhere I sense that if I slow down, moisture from the stones will begin to cling to the fragrant hairs on my arms. Luckily my friends in their crimped white hats fill my tray with meat

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pastries; the tray, in fact, seems to levee, and it guides me back around and up the stairs, the funny flaky bundles tugging along like a tiny pack of sleigh dogs until I’m sailing again among the tables, the nods, the orchestra of motion and sound, the pulsing colors, and light that ranges from staccato sparkle to low humming glow. I loop down into the kitchen, the kitchen streams by, and when I next rise from the basement I pause at the entrance, to see if I can, of my own volition, and it turns out I can. I feel like a rock in a river, but it’s because I’m still that I am able to notice what I notice: It’s a breath I’m taking, a breath like I have never taken before, one so discrete I can tell that it comes from somewhere. I am of the collective of servers, but then I take this breath that feels like an icy ribbon of vapor is being fed to me in this hotly buzzing room of kaleidoscopic bodies. It’s a breath that is coming from someone. As I take it, I can almost trace it, and then I do, I trace it back toward the kite it’s come from; I’m paused at the foot of the room and the other servers bend away from me convexly; I feel them pull, elastic, but I am held there with my tray; I am breathing the ribbon that has been sent to me. In the pause, I remember that I used to draw pictures as a child, something I stopped doing, I only now suspect, for some reason. In the pause, I remember drawing a picture of a road going into the distance. Did I draw it accidentally or is this something I learned? I remember that moment in my history when I discovered, just as some time in human history it was discovered, that a triangle in two dimensions can make two feel like three. It was sort of great, but it also ruined everything. I stretch my neck and close my eyes, and I am being pulled by the center line of this perspective. Have I ever used the word perspective? Would Becky, Jacob, Tandy use that word? I am being wrenched, I am being dragged, and then I feel the last tendrils of my connection to the serving corpus plucked away like nerves in a surgical amputation—plink, pluck—although it appears I’ve been properly numbed or stung or filled via breath with druggy distance for this ordeal. I’m so loopy. Time is wobbly around me, and space is, too, and the thing that’s going to happen is about to happen. I almost know I am on my way to being unimaginably blissed-out. At the top of the room, a woman, the kite herself, has risen

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and she stands at her table at the head of everything. She is dinging her glass with a fork. Her gown is yellow with silver threads. I know it from way back here, hot gold and cold silver. Her pale hair swoops around the back of her head, loose enough to form a halo. She’s got diamonds on. I am dumb and I am awed. One is worse. She looks wise, like an excellent actress. I don’t know what happens, but she speaks. There are bells, or applause. She is as if born of the room, molten, but then her tone shifts and the room turns moony, or her tone shifts and everyone’s cheeks glow like roses at once and light dapples their spotty heads. It’s true she’s too far away to see but that doesn’t seem to be the point of this experience. Luckily I have no idea how time moves here. All I know is it’s not mine. Not my time, not my place. And thank God. Mine sucks. Luckily I don’t have to wait. Luckily as I stand there and her voice reaches and feeds me I am stunned as if by certain kinds of insects I have never studied. What’s sharp? What’s smooth? This is sharp and smooth. She’s done dinging, and finished speaking, and now it’s a banquet peopled with playing cards, jacks, queens, kings, and jokers that simply fall away from the grid of round tables and who knows where the rest of the deck went; back below, long ago. Light pulses and spasms from the mirrors and the gilded ceiling. Then the light quiets and cools. The hall is a field of strewn white napkins. I see them blow away like petals. I see the tables take to their legs and scurry off stage. I see me at the foot of the hall. I see her at the head in her gown, dinging her glass and taking a breath to speak, but luckily I do not have to live through dessert or whatever social thing the mounds of guests might insist upon next because time here has moved as if for me and now they’re gone and now she’s laughing at them but she’s still exhausted and happy that the night was—what—swell? It was something. It was all right. It was exactly what we wanted. She throws her arm across my shoulder. She’d looked very tall but up close she’s my size. Her laugh is as soft as a charcoal line. I can remember my parents like this. Two in the morning, coming home, tired and tipsy. This is when I slept on the couch because it was a one-room place with a curtain divider, and Dad flopped into the easy chair, laughing, and Mom flopped onto his lap,

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shushing, and I said, “I’m awake, you dopes.” We’re pooped. We did it. It’s over. Let’s turn in. But first, link arms. First, a walk in the garden. We survey the lawn for a moment from the great front doors of the house. We leave the doors open as we descend the curving stairs, dramatic in the light behind us, and we pass the cherub, and then we pass the lithe angel, and then we stroll onto the lawn. The lawn is dotted with seven enormous trees, a leafy canopied kind. Old trees. Can’t transplant trees that old. There’s some light from the moon and some light from the lanterns the angel and the cherub are holding. Am I myself? I feel as if I am, if a little wobbly, and with an echo in those words: myself, wobbly. She left her yellow gown like an enormous rose head on the floor of the hall and now she wears only her underthings, a simple cotton shift, or something called something like that, and she’s taken her necklace off and strung it in her loosened hair so now she’s nymphy, as if we’ve made it to Deco, so perhaps I picked up a little more history than I like to remember. Under one tree is a man and a woman stretched out next to each other, the man on an elbow. They’re making out near his floppy hat. Under another tree a fat old man is passed out, spread-eagle on his back, his pocket watch sliding from his pants. We’re arm in arm. We’re strolling. I’m barefoot with my trousers rolled halfway up my calves. The grass is cool. The breeze moves. I’ve untucked my white shirt, and it moves, and her white little shift thingy moves. A paper cup blows by from another era. We’re almost ghosts. We’d be ghosts to anyone watching. Nothing hurts. When will we speak? Is it possible to speak in this condition? Back in my old life, we’d banter. I wouldn’t call it “banter,” I’d call it “reeling her in,” but that cannot happen here. Too coarse. Here, there are practically no edges. I already know her voice and it’s already an aspect of the bubbling of my own imagination, so what can we do? We weave among the seven trees of the rising and dipping lawn until we come upon a break in the hedges and are in a maze. She shifts half a step ahead of me, because the space is very narrow, quite dark, and I can feel the tips of boxwood leaves on my shoulders. It’s as if I hear the word boxwood and as if the maze is moving beneath my feet and I am still, peering past the motion of her hair, the maze turning

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and gliding. We emerge from it along a stone path in a garden of evenly spaced young trees with silver bark and leaves that clack. A glass greenhouse shines in shards in the dark like teeth, like shifting knives. We are also surrounded by roses, which is lucky, because it’s almost the only flower I know. As we walk we can smell them. Most of the roses smell pale, but we pass one that is sharper. “These are old roses,” she says. “Generation to generation. Passed down.” She is still a half step ahead and although I know the gleaming line of her jaw as if it’s always lived in my periphery, I haven’t seen her face since we entered the maze and I’m a little frightened. I’m afraid that if she turns to me her face might be cruel, after all. Then the voice that told me “boxwood” begins humming again under the leaves. She turns enough to meet my eyes and says, “It’s my gardener.” She is still herself. Then, around a bend, I see him, crouched beneath a plant that looks like a buffalo, peering at a turtle that is black as a stove and looks like a stone. He’s wrinkled, and muttering. He looks like my grandfather. He looks like a troll. He’s holding a lantern. Bugs and desperate moths flail around it, bouncing against the glass. She says—and what should I call her? my lady? my girl?—she says, “What do you say?” and the gardener squints in the filmy light, his lips moving. I can see his throat push a little harder. I can see him pushing the sound out. I can tell he hates me. My own grandfather. Her gardener. A troll. He begins what is clearly incantation. I tell you, my education is singing. He says, or he recites:

oenanthe crocata the water dropwort, coubane, butlersweet, solanum dulcamara, laburnum, sulfur tuft, atropa belladonna taxus baccata, amanita pantherina argaricus xanthodermus, helleborus purpura deathcap, russula einetica the sickener . . .

Is the turtle going to turn into something? “Ignore him,” she says. “Let’s go,” she says, and whisks me away before we can make a choice, before I am even certain there’s a choice to make. She whisks me away as if neither left nor right. She whisks me up. Up, up, and away. “He’s a creep,” she says. Then, we disappear.

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Darkness and she is almost all sound and smell. I am made of particles. She calls me urchin. She calls me waif. I’m an urchin. “You’re my waif. You are. You are my urchin.” These smiling words, one from the sea, one a limp city leaf. Here I am, in a wave of water, a wave of air, in the motion that makes up matter. I am honey, sugar, darling, all of them. I have the memory of her already. It could be the reason it is so dark, the memory I will have of her filling everything. We remain placeless in a way I almost fathom. This, love, is simply response to stimuli, I think, although I know enough to know I am not a thinker. An urchin knows nothing, knows only now, and now, and now. When I close my eyes I am overwhelmed by my own light. Morning and the bed is a boatful of feathers and we are floating under yellow blooming sheets. Her windows are enormous. Minty leaves shiver out there, fringing the view. Beyond them, though, if I squint, the gardener is approaching with a red machine slung by a strap over his shoulder. He’s wearing a cap. He’s hunched and ugly. What will become of me if I am someone who loves a woman with a gardener? “I’ll be back,” she says. “I’m famished.” She crosses the room. She’s not wearing the sheet. She’s left the sheet with me. She remains astonishing. From a hook behind the bathroom door she lifts a golden bell. She cups it in her hand like a bird and keeps it noiseless. She holds it in front of her as if she’s going to present it to me, as if she’s going to present it wryly, knowingly, writhing with our in-joke, the joke of how I would never do this; I would never get caught up. “Look, baby bird.” Am I a bird? Is the bell a bird? She keeps it cupped and hovering in front of her abdomen, and when she lifts her knee to the bed her muscles shift and when she lifts her other knee they shift again, but differently. I must be the bird; I am so fluttery. She’s kneeling before me, although we are clearly on the same level. I’m resting on my elbow, head in my hand. This can go on. I can see it. I know it. I can do it. I can see my rags and riches. I can do this, I think. I am tough enough.

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My hips are a hill under the blossoms. “Take the bell,” she says. She’s whispering. “Ring it. I give it to you. I give you everything.” Outside, the gardener is muttering, still. He’s a voice from the past. I believe I remember all of this from childhood. “I know this one,” she says. “You can listen but it’s best not to take it in. It’s actually a very funny tune.” He’s out of view, now, low, below the window. He revs his engine and under its roar and the spattering of the branches it encounters I hear the incantation rise: festuca rubra, festuca arundinacea, poa pratensis, poa trivialis elanor logro, elka master, lolium perenne, anthemis nobilis, agrostis stolonifera the creeping bent, polytrichum juniperinum, dactylis glomerata, phleum pratense . . . What the spell does is make me remember my dream. In my dream my grandfather tells me the story of Thomas Jefferson from Virginia and his architecturally important house, and the slaves in the tunnels, and he tells me the story of Mrs. Winchester from California, haunted by a fortune made from guns, the house she built crazily bumping into itself, stairs into ceilings, halls into brick walls, wings tumbling over one another as if out of breath. The houses bookend the country. I know that in dreams, when you dream of houses, you are dreaming of yourself. I don’t know what this means. In the dream, I’m just a little kid. I don’t know anything. “Grampa,” I say, tugging at his nightshirt, “where did you learn this? Did you learn this in school?” I stretch across the bed, pull myself to the windowsill to see if I can see down. She takes my hand and pulls me back in a swirl of sheets. She’s grinning, dazzling. She says, “Shut up, you fucker!” and slams the window, and the room shakes, and the bell rings in my palm, and several figs tumble into our laps, and breakfast, it turns out, is the most delicious of all.

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TRACY DAUGHERTY The Sailor Who Drowned in the Desert

t

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The Sunday service had just ended. Father Thomas had prayed, again, for a budget influx to fix the sanctuary door, which was old and splintered with rusty hinges. The parishioners filed out of the church building, through the cactus garden with its seven or eight ancient tombstones (one of them may have been only a rock—no one was certain, as all of the markers resembled rocks, with names and dates long since weathered away). Mrs. O’Doherty gave an astonished cry, which stilled the crowd among the brittle pink flowers and the thorns. Attached to one of the tombstones, embedded deeply into the granite, was a ship’s anchor made of iron. A rope extended from a large ring at the tip of the anchor, where the rope was tied fast, and rose into the sky until its other end vanished out of sight. Everyone stood aside and made a path so Father Thomas could approach the gleaming object. It appeared to be wet, though this was not possible; the day, like all the days in West Texas, was arid and dusty. The young priest bent to inspect the shiny hooks jutting out of the stone. As he did so, the rope rustled, went slack, then pulled taut again as though someone in the sunny heavens had given it a good, hard tug. Father Thomas stepped back. The parishioners inched away toward the safety of the church (Mrs. O’Doherty backed into a cactus thorn and gave a little “O!”). A little girl named Hannah, clutching her mother’s skirt, said, “Listen!” Everyone stood still. From far above their heads came a low murmur. It sounded like thunder but there weren’t any clouds, and the more everyone listened, the more the noise sounded like voices, perhaps half a dozen of them, concerned and trying to solve a problem. The rope continued to rustle. Then Hannah said “Look!” and they all saw a young man, with wavy hair as yellow as the sunlight, clambering down the rope toward the anchor and the stone. He wore pants as blue as the sky. No shirt. His skin was the light brown hue of blowing dust in the late

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afternoon. He appeared to be struggling as he moved down the rope. It was as though an element dense and resistant slowed his arms and legs. When he reached the anchor he remained suspended, upside down, on the rope. He did not seem to notice the group, mouths agape, huddled around him among the flowers and the thorns. From his pants pocket he produced a small silver blade. With it he began to saw on the rope, right where it was knotted to the top of the anchor. As he worked, he weakened visibly, his arm slowing, his grasp loosening on the coils of the line, his face turning blue. After only two or three minutes, and with little success in freeing the rope from the massive iron weight, he dropped the blade and fell to the ground. Dust puffed around him. The crowd backed away again. Again, Mrs. O’Doherty pricked herself in the rear. “O! O!” she cried. A tall old man stepped forward, out of the group. This was Dr. Alexander, who had delivered all of the babies in the parish (recently, there had been only two additions to the dwindling community, Hannah, now seven, and a boy a year younger named Joey). Dr. Alexander pushed past Father Thomas. He knelt beside the fellow in the sky-blue pants. The doctor sniffed the air. Now everyone smelled it, too: salt and brine. A blue horsefly buzzed about the doctor’s head as he placed his ear to the stranger’s chest, felt for a pulse in his wrist, and examined his eyes and throat. “This man’s lungs are filled with water,” said Dr. Alexander. “He has drowned.” “Impossible,” said Father Thomas. “See for yourself,” the doctor answered. He pressed firmly on a spot between the stranger’s ribs. Water, green as seaweed, spurted from the young man’s mouth. Everyone gasped as though each person, old and young, had developed breathing trouble. Timidly, someone wondered aloud if this were all an omen— of what, he couldn’t say. Perhaps the cactus garden was sacred ground. It held the bones of desert pioneers. Who knows? The parishioners’ heedless trampling of the dirt each week was an affront to God, maybe, and the spirits of these elders. If so, why an anchor, why a sailor, someone asked. What did these things have to do with the desert? Someone else suggested that the drowned young man might be a warning to the community that it was in danger of disappearing.

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After all, only two children had been born here in the last seven years; we are not being fruitful, we are not multiplying. We are getting old, all of us, and our good works will be swept away, with scarcely a ripple. Everyone agreed that this notion, however plausible, still did not explain why God had failed to speak to them through symbols more suited to the desert. A burning bush would be more like it, someone mumbled. Then little Joey, the youngest member of the parish, squeezed past the men and women, who stood planted, scratching their heads. Joey held an open Bible. Almost from birth, he had been a precocious reader. His mother read aloud to him every night from the Old and New Testaments, and made him follow her index finger with his eyes as it glided through thickets of words on the page. “Right here,” he said. “In the book of Genesis. God separated the waters above the firmament from those below.” He looked up. “There must be a sea above the sky!” Father Thomas stared at Joey with amazement and pride. “Listen!” Hannah said again. The racket above them grew louder. Now, six wavy-haired young men, also dressed in blue pants and no shirts, came scurrying one by one down the rope. One gripped a small silver blade similar to the instrument the first young man had carried. Two others balanced between them a thick wooden palette about the length of an adult male. The parishioners gave them room. Should they rush to greet these glistening figures? Should Mrs. O’Doherty run inside the church and whip up a big batch of potato salad for a hospitality luncheon? But the strangers, like their brother before them, appeared to be oblivious to the crowd. While the one with the blade hacked at the knot in the rope, the others attempted to fasten their drowned compatriot to the palette, using hemp straps. After two or three minutes, their faces all turned blue. They seemed unable to breathe. Finally, the rope snapped free of the anchor. It flew this way and that, as though tugged by an object in turbulent motion. The man with the blade signaled urgently to the others. They dropped the palette. It thumped against a tombstone, raising dust, and came to rest against it at a forty-five degree angle to the ground. The strangers gathered their fallen comrade in their arms and hurried to link hands. The man closest to the end of the rope snatched the line as it began to

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rise into the air, and he pulled the others behind him until they had winked out of sight in the uppermost reaches of the sky. None of the parishioners spoke. Mrs. O’Doherty pulled a thorn from her flesh. “O!’ she cried. Silently, Joey pointed to the palette, then he gestured at the sanctuary door. Six years later, Dr. Alexander was the first of the old generation to die. Then Mrs. O’Doherty. Father Thomas lived to the flinty old age of ninety-eight and by the time he was ready to lay his body down for the last time, Joey was a vigorous middle-aged man—who called himself Joe—on fire with the words of the Lord. As they passed away, one by one, the parishioners were laid to rest under sparkling new tombstones on a small rise overlooking the cactus garden with its flowers, thorns, and graying, weathered markers. Joe worked hard to maintain the fresh headstones, but the sun and the dust were already beginning to wear names and dates off the square granite faces. Hannah had married Joe’s younger brother, who was born a year after the visitation of the sailors from the sky. Her seven children sang joyously each Sunday, and louder than anyone else, after Joe’s sermons. The remaining elders said these were beautiful youngsters and, along with a few others born to families over time, were bound to produce healthy stock for the future. Each week, once the service had ended, the parishioners filed from the church building, brushing their fingers across the solid sanctuary door, carved from the left-behind palette, and the hinges fashioned from the hooks of the anchor. Every now and then, one of the men or women glanced up. Though all year the days remained arid and dusty, sometimes, someone said, the sky turned—just a little, over in the east (“Look! Look!”)—the color of the sea.

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ESPIDO FREIRE Irlanda, Chapter One

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Translator’s Introduction Although Espido Freire is not the only Spanish woman writer who uses the fairy tale as a motif for her fictional work, she is certainly unique among writers of her generation, who tend to favor gritty urban realism. In fact, Freire’s fictional worlds are closer to those of “El Boom” writers of Latin America, who popularized magical realism decades ago. As her novel Irlanda shows, Freire’s protagonists inhabit a world full of magical qualities and try to make sense out of their lives through the fairy tale. The 1998 novel Irlanda marked Espido Freire’s literary debut. It is a modern, dark retelling of fairy tales, and the good does not always triumph over the evil, as the line between the two forces is blurred in her fictional world. Irlanda tells the story of Natalia, a fifteen-year-old girl with a strong imagination. Natalia reacts to her surroundings and events in her life through the lens of the fairy tale. She encounters spirits in trees, meadows, and streams, and the ghosts of dead animals torment her in dreams. Natalia has two sisters—one of them, Nena, (which means “baby girl”) is only five, and another, Sagrario, has recently died after having suffered a long illness. However, Natalia is haunted by Sagrario’s last days, and she feels her sister’s presence everywhere. Irlanda, Natalia’s cousin, embodies the fairy tale princess. She is perfect in Natalia’s eyes. Although Natalia is not evil by any means, she ends up destroying the perfection her cousin represents. This excerpt, the first chapter of the novel, finds how Natalia’s family copes with the death of Sagrario shortly after the burial. As grief-stricken as their daughter is, Natalia’s parents decide to send her to the country house, a “little fairy tale cottage,” where the ghosts of the previous century dwell among the living. Like The Tempest’s Miranda, Natalia is an exiled princess. Also, she resembles Cinderella, the poor relation, as Irlanda fills the role of the stepsister.

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Sagrario is a pale-faced princess, who keeps appearing before Natalia and reminding her of her guilt. Once Natalia arrives at the country house, she has to confront what lurks in the shadows all by herself. Like other female authors of modern fairy tales, Freire puts a feminist spin on the fairy tale genre. For instance, female characters have a dominant presence in the novel, and men largely stay in the background, as Freire is mainly interested in exploring relationships between female characters. Natalia does not find her prince at the end of the story since she does not need one. However, unlike Disney versions of fairy tales, no one will live happily ever after in Irlanda.

—Toshiya Kamei, Translator

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ESPIDO FREIRE Irlanda, Chapter One

Translated by Toshiya Kamei

s

 1

agrario died in May after much suffering. She was buried after a service at the packed church. Many flowers lay on her grave during the first week, but they soon disappeared. Every day Nena and I went to the cemetery to clear away the mourning wreaths that had wilted. Nena shooed away the cats that sneaked in under the entrance gate, gathered palm leaves and flowers, and asked me if any of them were poisonous. We carefully arranged them together to dry in my flower press. My mother wanted to make a scrapbook with these flowers, the ribbons, and the strand she had cut from my sister’s hair. Things went back to the way they had been before, although we saw my parents wandering aimlessly around the house, as if they had too many things to do. I went back to the room I had shared with Sagrario and slept with my face turned away from the empty bed. We treated Nena as if she would be the next one to die and stopped letting her play in the street, because we were afraid of kidnappers and cars. Whenever Nena and I got home from school, we found my mother in front of the empty bed in my room, seated on the bench she had barely left in the last few months. She would be praying, or reading a letter from her sister. She looked up at Nena and me. “I need to send you away,” she said, and I was scared. I was certain that she too saw Sagrario when she sat there, and that wasn’t fair of Sagrario. Then my mother wiped her tears. I breathed easier because she had no idea that my sister visited me at night and danced in circles. She had her own suffering in mind and wanted to spare us her pain. The shop windows of the large department stores were filled with bright-colored clothes, beachwear, and outdoor gear. The

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funeral flowers dried in my press, and my mother made a scrapbook with Sagrario’s photos in the diary where my sister had written down what she saw and thought. Nena removed the flowers from the press and looked at them against the light. “They were from the caretaker’s bouquet. And the nuns at school sent these red peonies. They’re not poisonous, are they?” “No,” I said. “They aren’t poisonous.” My aunt’s letters kept arriving, and my mother watched us and shook her head. Other times, when Nena had already gone to bed, she called to me and read aloud a passage from Sagrario’s diary. I knew my sister didn’t want us going through her things, but with the flowers, her ribbons, and her photos, her diary had become as much my mother’s book as hers, and my mother found a melancholy pleasure in deciphering Sagrario’s difficult handwriting. When Nena was in bed, I sat next to my mother and listened to her while she caressed my hair. “Listen to this, Natalia.” This constant fading in and out destroys me and keeps me from looking cheerful in front of my family. I often think about what these places will be like when I’m gone. If I could just get out of bed and walk again, I’d stop feeling like I’m turning into a different person every minute. But nothing is clear, except this constant change inside me and the stillness of everything around me. My mother stopped reading, tears welling up. “My poor daughter.” Soon we learned my sister’s secret words by heart. She used initials for our names, which disappeared gradually when she started focusing more on herself as she steadily drew closer to death. I always opened the scrapbook to the same place, a half-written page that beckoned me like faraway church bells. I read the poems in the book they gave me and love is in all of them, surrounded by foam, dream, dust, stars. Everything is so beautiful, but I don’t think love is anything like that. Love could appear on a clear day when I sit on a bench with a book, and I watch pigeons peck at breadcrumbs in the grass. Then he sits next to me with his book, and my heart starts pounding. It stops beating, or beats so fast I can’t keep reading. I look at him. He returns my glance and brings my hand to his lips. He kisses it. This is love.

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Now that her heart had stopped beating forever, I wished Sagrario had found the love she wrote about. She wouldn’t be alone in the dance of death, only her turtle trailing after her, and wouldn’t attract the wicked souls jumping and circling and giving in to the dance’s dark pleasure. My mother took the diary away from me and read it aloud. I listened, obedient. Classes ended in early June, and I waited for my baby sister at the school gate. Nena held a bundle of drawings with sober colors and large handwriting. I had a pink report card with good grades and an envelope with a letter to my parents in it. We smiled at the bus driver, who, surprised, didn’t smile back right away. I let Nena cross the street against a red light, running to get past cars that braked hard, tires screeching. We were almost happy that we could spend the whole day at home. We would take long walks through the fields to pick plants for my herbarium, and maybe we would cheer up the house a bit for a while. The nights would get shorter, so would my nightmares, and I would be less haunted by the turtle that had tormented me since I was a little girl and by the last image of Sagrario’s pale face among the pillows. “Can we go to the public garden?” asked Nena. “You’re not allowed to pick plants there.” “Then why do they plant flowers?” “Grown-ups do lots of useless things.” My mother was sitting in my room, two stacks of folded clothes on the bed. From the door I asked, “Are you going to give Sagrario’s clothes away?” She shook her head. She combed Nena’s hair with her fingers. “Not a day goes by that I don’t receive a letter from my sister. She wants me to let you spend the summer there. Nena could stay with them and you’ll be with your cousins in the country house. Go eat now. Wash your hands.” She grabbed Nena by the wrist. “Don’t you see how dirty they are?” “Nobody lives in the country house anymore,” I said, seating myself at the table. “Your cousins and their friends are there. Your uncle wants to sell the property, and they want to fix it up a bit. You’ll love it. I

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can’t keep you in here any longer.” She shook her head. “It’s not a healthy environment for you. For either of you.” My father agreed. He slowly cut meat into pieces for Nena. She wasn’t allowed to use a knife. “Your aunt and uncle want you to stay with them. After they sell the house, you won’t have a chance to enjoy your summer like that.” After the meal, when we were doing the dishes, my father opened the letter that accompanied my report card. He read it with a frown, then left it on the table. “Have you read what the nuns say?” “No,” I answered. “They say you get distracted, you don’t work well in a group, and you’re unsociable. And they say perhaps you should show more interest in math. What do you think of that?” “I should try harder in math,” I admitted, looking down. “They’re so heartless. Of course you get distracted. I didn’t even expect you to finish the term.” He took my hands and hugged me. “Come here. You’re a good student, a good daughter.” His voice was filled with tears. He held me close to him for a moment. Then I slipped into the living room, and Nena came closer to me. “Who are they, aunt and uncle?” she asked. “Mama’s sister. Don’t you remember? They were here for Sagrario’s saint’s day. She was a beautiful woman. She held you in her arms. She gave you the blue clown.” “They didn’t come to the funeral?” “No.” “Oh,” she said, losing interest. She didn’t say anything else and spent the afternoon playing quietly. The phone rang and she rushed to answer it, as always, and my mother got there first, as always. Nena wasn’t allowed to play with the phone. “It was your aunt,” my mother said. “She expects both of you tomorrow.” Nena thought nothing of it, but as the hours went by, she started pouting. That night she didn’t stop crying, and she hugged my mother’s knees, asking her not to send her away. My mother cried too.

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“She’s too young to spend the whole summer away from her parents,” she decided. “But you’re going, aren’t you, honey? Don’t make me look bad in front of my sister. They don’t have animals in the house anymore, your aunt promised me. I’m going to pack your things. Don’t you understand if you stay here all summer, it’ll be as if nothing had changed, and I can’t force myself to be strong? You know we need to do this.” I agreed in the end, because I kept tossing and turning all night and the turtle was coming back to haunt me. Also, I wanted to please my mother. She smiled with relief and made me pack my things for the same day. I gathered my clothes and started ironing. It was the only chore I enjoyed. Ironing and taking care of my sisters. Nena had stretched out on the floor next to me, drawing. “Now I remember aunt and uncle. They sent a white wreath with lilies and arum lilies like trumpets. Are lilies poisonous?” “No,” I said, almost out of habit. “But you shouldn’t eat arum lilies.” She rested on her elbow and handed me her drawing. “Look.” “What’s this?” I raised my voice and tried to deceive my mother, who was walking down the hallway. “I see. Another princess sleeping in her coffin? Now she has to wait for the prince to come and kiss her.” “No,” she said. “It’s Sagrario. It’s for you.” I put her drawing aside and stared at Nena. I pressed the tip of her nose with my finger, to make her smile, and I went back to my ironing. She lay down again. “Natalia...” “I’m busy right now.” “Tell me the story of when I was born.” “I’ve told you a thousand times.” “You haven’t told me for a long time. I’ll start and you finish,” she said, as if making a concession. “Papa told you Sagrario had to sleep in your room because you were about to have a brother. And she told you it would be better if this brother wouldn’t be born.” I sighed. “I was ten, and Sagrario was a year younger. Then Papa told Sagrario and me, ‘This afternoon we’re moving Sagrario’s bed to your room.’ Sagrario said, ‘Why? I like my room.’ And Papa

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answered, ‘Because you’re going to have a brother and he’s going to need a lot of space.’ He left happy. Sagrario looked at me and said, ‘I wish he wouldn’t be born.’ We were playing with beautiful dolls our aunt gave us, they had real hair. Sagrario could still walk, though barely. And I asked, ‘Why?’ She answered, ‘Because I’ll be cured if he dies.’ ‘Why do you believe that?’ I asked. And she told me, ‘Because that’s the way it is. Everybody says people don’t have two sick kids in one family. So if he’s sick, I’ll be fine.’ And I said, ‘Then I want him to die too.’ But you were born, you were healthy, and you grabbed everyone’s finger with your tiny hands. And Sagrario said, ‘Now I’m going to die.’ ‘No, you’re not going to die,’ I told her. ‘Because I’m always with you and I won’t let the ghosts take you away.’ ‘I’m going to die alone one night, no one will notice, and you won’t be able to do anything,’ she said. ‘Yes, I can,’ I promised her. ‘I’ll be with you when you die and I’ll tell them to take me.’ And she said, ‘No, you won’t.’” “But you weren’t there,” said Nena. “Sagrario died alone.” “Yes,” I answered. “We found her alone in the morning. As soon as I promised her I would let the ghosts take me instead of her, I started having nightmares. Dark spirits were all around me and I couldn’t sleep. I cried so much Papa made Sagrario tell what was going on. She told him everything and he punished us hard. Then that night, before we fell asleep, Sagrario talked to me. ‘They don’t need to take you instead of me,’ she said. ‘It’s not necessary.’” My mother came into the bedroom. She had adjusted Sagrario’s three dresses to my size and folded them with care. “What were you talking about?” she asked. Nena dashed into the hallway. “Nothing!” she shouted as she ran away. My mother shook her head. “I don’t want you talking to her anymore about death, or Sagrario, or ghosts in the shadows. She’s obsessed with death and it’s not normal for a girl of her age. This summer I’m going to invite some of her friends to make the house cheerful. She should watch more TV and ask for toys for Christmas instead of....” After a pause she continued, “I’ve been thinking, you could take your herbarium with you. The country house isn’t like a city house. The nearest town is far away, and you need something to keep you busy. It’s a good place to work on your collection.”

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“But it’s so hard to carry,” I protested. “Besides, they don’t want me to bring toys.” “No, it’s not. And it was your aunt who gave you your first flower press.” She kept packing my clothes. “The house was yours too, wasn’t it?” I asked suddenly. “Yes, I sold it along with everything in it.” “Why did you sell your share of the inheritance?” My mother didn’t answer right away. When she spoke again, her voice was different. “Because we needed money.” Then she turned away. “Natalia, I heard you crying last night. Were you having nightmares again?” “Yes,” I said. “The turtle?” “Yes.” “They don’t have animals anymore. You won’t see any. You’re not going to have nightmares there.” I nodded and went to my room. I threw myself onto Sagrario’s bed. It felt strange to be lying there, on her bed that was now mine, after I had shared the room with Nena during the last year. My life had been constant moving from one room to another. There were some changes. The small television, which nobody watched, a few old issues of teen magazines, two large black and white oxygen tanks, the ones we hadn’t got rid of, which flanked the bed like canopy columns. I got up. It was going to be a hot day. I opened the balcony window. It was the only room away from the street and the traffic noise, and that’s why Sagrario used it. From there I saw a park that was built five years earlier, with green benches, pigeons, and a fountain. Grandparents were sitting there and having lunch with their grandchildren. Sagrario had enjoyed looking out at the park and imagining what their lives were like. Then a boy slightly older than me appeared. Under his arm he held a blue folder and a book. He sat on a bench in front of our window and opened his book. I watched him with interest. He read for a half hour. Then he got up, straightened his pants, and left. I stuck my head out the window to watch him until he disappeared around the corner, swallowed up in traffic. That’s him, I thought.

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Sagrario’s love. Every morning she had waited for him and watched him, and he didn’t know and never even once looked toward the balcony. Love lurks in strange places. I threw myself onto the bed again. Now he’s mine, I thought, surprised by the unexpected gift my sister had left me. I packed my luggage, wrapped the tools for my herbarium as if they were treasures, and listened to my parents’ advice. Nena made me another drawing for the trip. It was a field sown with flowers and crosses. I hid it from my mother. “Be careful with poisonous plants,” Nena said as she hugged me tight, turning her chubby knuckles white. “Don’t worry.” “Is Sagrario going with you?” “Yes,” I said, touching her nose with the tip of my index finger. “Like always. I’ll take Sagrario with me.” It was a scorching day, the damp stuck to our skin. It was a prelude to the warm, pleasant summer, which I didn’t imagine when I left my house that morning. I remembered each step along the path that had grown old and recognized little by little the memories we had left behind. There was a house in the middle of the field, surrounded by flowers, water, dark trees, and running children, and a grandmother with amethyst necklaces and coral cameos, and a grandfather with a silver cane. A little fairy tale cottage where the girls were dressed in long gowns and added a pearl to their necklaces each year. And they hosted balls where they slid across the marble floor, their dresses rustling, feather fans in their hands. At least that’s what the grown-ups who told the stories assured us, and that’s what my mother said, too, bringing back from oblivion what her grandparents and their grandparents had passed on to her, long after the dresses, feathers, and laughter behind the fans had faded, because none of us, not even my mother nor my aunt, had lived through those splendid days, and you couldn’t tell what had really happened from what had been made up each time those stories were told. That evening I left the village, which was solitary and somber as a funeral. The streetlamps ended barely one kilometer out of the village, and the road was lit by a few yellow lights on old walls.

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Even though it had been a sunny day, streams of water ran through the street, and I supposed it had rained. A few scattered sheep were looking for shelter and bleating under the black trees. The woods became thicker. When I was little, I imagined that the branches sticking into the sky were goblins’ arms trying to snatch me away. I closed my eyes and thought about Sagrario. Somewhere on this earth, she raised her feeble arms, petrified in an oak tree. It was my first time to go to the country all by myself, but I didn’t think of that until much later. As I pressed my forehead against the cold window, it struck me that I had already lived through this. During most of my trip, I knew all my movements in advance, as if a strange vision was telling me what would come next. It was just like those dreams that turned into nightmares, and I was afraid that everything was the turtle’s trick to seize me while I slept. I said my name seven times, and the strange feeling began to lift. I opened my eyes again and found myself on the way to the country house. My cousins had been there for days when I arrived. They greeted me outside the house, under the rose bushes that arched over the door. It had been three years since I’d last seen them, and still confused by Sagrario’s breath in the oak trees, the heat, the night falling upon us, I noticed only that Roberto was much taller than me and that Irlanda’s smile was beautiful in the last rays of the afternoon sun. Time does foolish things suddenly. It starts running, or it stops. There was a time when I had blind faith in the clock. Hours ticked away at their own pace, faster in my house, slower when I was in school, but the grains of sand kept falling, which made me grow, measured with both clock hands. Time started to play tricks on me when the minutes of greetings and kisses from my cousins stretched into eternity, when Irlanda’s sideways glance seemed frozen in the air, or when my hands, which had never been clumsy before, missed Roberto’s. I suspected then that time goes round like the hands of a clock, and mine would have to go round and round, like a story that repeats forever, around the house and its green fields.

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SARAH HANNAH Three Poems

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Diana, Hunting Words

Seems like she just keeps running through her woods, Grasping: violet, bramble, thatch, stumped utterly. Nouns, those faithful slender hounds, those Tender lagomorphs, have turned On her and flown, soft haunches gone to flexion, Swifted deep into a burrow. Is it some kind of infection, all this spit And struggle? Her brow’s a furrow. She parses grasses, lifts her arrow, points, can’t see. Don’t ask her what she wants for lunch; She’ll just start hunting turkey, gesticulating Chicken salad, tuna fish, but no such utterances Come; they’ve gotten stuck inside her brain— A confusion of swells; They dally just beyond her mighty grip, Or flirt out there with all her nymphs— All those things, those fucking things, you know! Rabbit, rabbit; cigarette; taxi out of here; Cigarette, damnit, nightgown, oncologist, Rabbi. And that other noun, that pronouncement Firm as cement, the blight too large to voice, Waits silently, inscribed in numbers on a chart Behind a silver board, and it pours suddenly, But there’s no longer any word for rain, only cloud. 43


Progressive Dreaming

Midnight, and you’re scaling the windows By the mullions, the sills’ elaborate scrolls. You pull into your old house like a skilled burglar. You are, actually, different: you’re in high boots, your posture Has improved, your hair is longer. And with that simultaneous awareness of dream and waking life, You steal across the upstairs hall to the linen closet. Once, it held not only towels But deep white drawers with wooden boats And packets of black-and-white photographs (“Ansco All-Weather Film”) yellowing with acids. You pull out just one image: the house under previous owner: A stout woman in sables standing proudly On the dry, sunny lawn, a Great Dane at her side— This particular print Defaced by the palmate scratchings of a fountain pen (Your mother drew in hedges to see how they would look). The closet walls are papered With antique fleur-de-lis, each flower padded, a tiny pillow In the wall in a regular pattern. Delighted, you press them, climbing the drawers To the ceiling, Until your fingers stop at a cold brass latch. At its release a trap door falls open, and with an ease That comes only in dreams, You hoist yourself into the bottom half of a gabled room. The air is sweet with cedar. On your left is a steep, slatted staircase, On your right, a grove of enormous zinnias Made of embroidery thread and fenced in with rickrack. Above them, a blue crepe dress hangs on a nail. It is teeming with finches and pearls; When it moves you hear the faint sound of flapping. It belonged to the sable-coated woman— A Vanderwyck of Boston, long dead. You know the dress will fit you but it cannot be removed,

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Just as you know another floor awaits you In the gable. But you have to leave. The current owners will return; You’ll be arrested for breaking and entering. Again, the awareness, passing swiftly overhead: In waking life the house burned to the ground. You cross the room to a small open window. You can see the whole neighborhood. The moon glows pink; the giant pines are made of mint. You breathe it in. On the sill, burnt into the wood, A line of careful script: “You are nine hundred feet in the air.”

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The Haunted Suburb The land plowed by tractors Is haunted by oaks, by the circling Protests of sparrows unnested. The brick in the yard by the fiddlehead fern Is haunted by the toad Who lived for many years Beneath it. When he climbed out One day and didn’t return, The brick cracked in half. And the suburb is haunted by girls, Of indeterminate shape And accommodating color, Swift in nylon jerseys. Their questions are whorled in new leaf, Their names transcribed in the pokeweed’s Purple ink. You heard it In the neighboring yard; the children’s Shouts and rhyming games Reminded you of yours, Grown and gone, and you’ve Gone also, and the suburb Is haunted by you; the beige Mansion is haunted by the cottage That burned in its place, and you And I we pace those long Halls nightly. And the suburb Is haunted by girls—they have

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Never left it, really— A swatch of skirt, a curled Hair will catch on a branch In the felling of the tree, and I Am caught on the land and it haunts me, And we are running through the briar.

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LILY HOANG Chapters 11 - 20 from Changing: A Novella

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11: Peace

Mother with her silence listening to Father & he with his hardness & his stubbornness & his anger & Mother pretending calm by caging tongue behind teeth & not speaking & there is little calm in our home.

You needing to know things & I letting you & you needing & I letting & I telling & is this the way we find in this our relationship some peace & constancy of you needing & I giving with altruism & you taking?

Translator translating for this one calling it Prevading & I being humble & not knowing what a word like prevading could mean & searching for words in dictionaries & maybe it’s misspelled or just plain the wrong word.

Little girl sitting still with her little legs crossed & little girl trying to sit still with her little legs crossed & little girl starting to fidget & little girl closing her little eyes & trying so hard & getting upset & angry.

Sister Big sister telling me how brother Big brother on the day of fathers didn’t call our father & I saying to sister Big sister that I have tried to talk to him & he won’t hear me the youngest & she saying she wants peace.

& I having the reputation now of being for the family a dissonant that I having the reputation of telling them the family when they hurt my feelings & when I speak they stop speaking to me with permanence.

Saying that the small departs & the great approaches & success will come from that movement & me hating this hexagram hating this fortune & me insisting that this will not be truth because in case you haven’t noticed in case you haven’t realized I am now the author your author & I am writing your future in this the past & I insist & so you too should insist that it is when the great departs & the small approaches that will bring peace because greatness derives from the small. Us lovers becoming pronouns becoming roles played in our family our pride & you can be the man & I lover I can be the woman because I lover I am woman & you lover you are man & our pride could be so peaceful if this was this way but lover you are only man because so long ago you took tests & your parents lover said you would be great & you grow to be a great man & l over I took that same test lover & I too was told I should be great & now I want to be your man. Image of Earth over Heaven how lovely to imagine that even in heaven is the complexity of earth layers of stratosphere mirroring layers of lithosphere & mantle & core that logic saying above Heaven is coldness like night like beads of frost coming before the sun waking but image of Earth over Heaven telling that I’m wrong that above Heaven is a warmth like hot like the memory of the city of heat we both try to forget the city of heat smothering us with her hot calm.

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11: Obstruction

Delineations & definitions: 1. Obstruction being to obstruct to get in the way like I tried to be an obstruction so that the little fat girl wouldn’t get hit but my body being so much smaller than hers I couldn’t obstruct enough. 2. Obstruction being standstill or stagnation like the city of heat preventing people from breath like the city of heat keeping me stuck there not growing like grass dying when Father leaves. 3. Obstruction being the wife like me never wanting to be obstruction. Us lovers being human & having fears us lovers fearing that we will become content & contentment will become boredom & you saying Lover please challenge me & me saying Lover I’m afraid of conflict & you saying Lover if you don’t challenge me I’ll be content like my parents & me saying Lover please don’t do that please don’t leave me & me holding arms like T uppercased & me saying Lover you have a temper & you saying That’s it Lover keep on telling. Memory of city of heat & I was working in the place that was my work & second dysfunctional family with brother Big brother & Adam I’m calling him Adam & Adam’s mother & Adam’s aunt & friends I had friends there & memory of the day it rained until the next day & until 3 days after that & the streets barricaded like revolution & water becoming river with bench floating rafts & brother Big brother saying Sister we’ve got to get home before we’re fully stranded. This hexagram is not about the water. It’s about Heaven over Earth, which of course, if you think about it, makes rain that becomes the water that can surround that can barricade like a moat to protect princesses.

Impossible for the great to obstruct the small when small is smaller than great & much more crafty & impossible to catch between cracks of the great, the small runs free through escaping through cracks quite large

Father taking me to school my first time away saying Daughter whatever you do in life there will be many challenges to stop you but don’t go left don’t go right stay straight just straight. & I eager to get away.

Standstill. Evil people do not further. The perseverance of the superior man. The great departs; the small approaches. This is what translator translating says for this is what he says & I just restate his words again to you.

That us lovers playing chess & my style is not so clean & that my end game takes forever that you lover become frustrated that I lover can’t just beat you until I’ve got it all but your king & still I lover stalemate you.

Mother & Father buying a new home a home they can’t afford with two layers & them wanting us family to stay there forever but home not being a good enough obstruction for any of us children to keep us.

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13: Befriending People

I going off to college & I making friends & I trusting them my friends my roommates my friends & Mother & Father telling me again & again not to trust them & I not listening & I wanting to keep my friends & I doing what they do & I always wanting friends & then came the cops & then came jail for a week & I not knowing what was going on & I in the crazy ward playing dominoes & I wishing for my friends. My friends calling the cops on me & that I didn’t know. Talk & walk you talk & walk all day long, isn’t that true? & in all that time of your talking & walking it’s only today this morning that you realize you’ve been talking & walking all by yourself & often people stare. That man needs the occasional friend & you without many friends, it’s time to clean your hands to prepare for shaking. That man needs the occasional friend & you with many many friends, it’s time for you to learn which friends to keep & which to release free. Father being a difficult man a hard man & Mother being passive & Father loving Mother enough to bring her family to the city of heat while his family remains in the country of heat & Mother always loving Father for that & Mother & Father making friends with the family & Mother & Father not having other friends & Father getting upset at Mother’s family & Father pouting like a lump & Mother being Mother & loving Father & Mother refusing to talk to her family as well. Little girl with purple monkey playing & little girl playing & loving & never leaving purple monkey the purple monkey big sister gave her & purple monkey with only one ear & it smelling that it’s nose swells shut & still little girl playing & taking it to baths & taking it to school & naming it & loving it & little girl not noticing that other little kids play with other little kids but not little girl playing alone with her purple monkey her only friend the only friend she needs. What isn’t known is that Jack of Jack & the beanstalk & Jack & Jill going up the hill are the same Jack that Jack after losing Jill going up the hill & falling back down & Jill being dead Jack bought his magic beanstalk.

That Heaven exists above whether there is drought or fire or water or rain down below. That at this moment somewhere below the clouds there is a fire dancing & playing & making best friends with what it destroys.

That this is really my first time away from the city of heat & that this here a flatland & coming here that I was alone & missing the heat that I came from the heat that’s what you don’t know about me that I was born from the heat of that city that city of heat & now in this flatland I can’t survive that when I first came here I was sure all this flatness would flatten me down into the earth & I would become a hot coin flattened & then came the people who would become friends.

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14: Great Possessing

Mother & Father & sister & brother like birds immigrating but instead of flying south they fly east until they reach the next continent & Mother & Father & brother & sister like birds without wings like birds with nothing but instinct & they family landing in Pennsylvania to nest & they family coming from the country of heat & building nests in the snow & they family breathing in ice & sister & brother huddling & cuddling producing only in memory the heat of their country Little girl holding her little purple monkey & little girl taking monkey around by its tail a purple nub & little girl not caring & little girl loving because sister Big sister gave it & she loving sister Big sister much than all.

Us lovers playing Go & I being the one that taught you & I saying the rules are so simple but it is you lover you are the one that dominates the one that takes possession of my territory & the one that wins this game.

That other tellers of fate have read this one as positive that translator not me translator but translators before me have read this one & said Possession in Great Measure Success & I reading this hexagram & seeing nothing good & seeing only little girls crying over spoiled milk that little girls spit out of mouths onto the ground & seeing curdles of curdles & that being the only thing they possess that of nothing that of sour milk but I telling you that those little girls are great. Jack & Jill running over & up & trembling down the hill & Jill being hurt & Jack being Jack saying Jill get up get up & Jill whimpering softly & Jack running into town & seeing a man with a beard saying Excuse me Man Sir Excuse me I have a problem & the problem is Jill that Jill indeed is most broken this time & what can I trade for a broken Jill & the man with the beard stroking it & thinking before saying I’ve little to offer but just this one bean & Jack saying Deal! Working day to day from nine to five & working when arriving home & only when reaching the bed only then relaxing & you out there lying in bed & being so tired & your body & time rented for money & finally you exhausted & lids dropping heavy & you opening popping lids like springs to keep eyes there keep eyes aware to look around at all you have & just now you wondering about work tomorrow & work the day after & popping eyes to watch your belongings Sister Big sister saying she bought it for little girl bought it in the city of humid thinking of little girl & little girl believing until one day sister Big sister telling little girl the truth & little girl now older hearing sister Big sister tell her that some guy gave it to her in a bar that he won it from a claw machine & little girl thinking how she worshiped that monkey so purple so special being like sister Big sister a goddess & little girl thinking how that purple monkey was once her pride.

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15: Befriending People

You saying how you’re humbled & I want to take words & rip them apart letter by letter & insert each symbol into my open mouth & swallow without chewing & I want to feel your words recompose changed in my belly.

The day they took off my clothes, hosed me down with subzero water, took coarse detergent to my skin, & scraped off layers like a croissant. They called it a flea bath & I said I was guilty & I was guilty & shamed.

That my mother & father don’t speak the language fluently that they take insults from strangers with regularity like pills like medicine swallowing without water like humility like theirs doesn’t need lubricant.

Bow your head slowly until the crown is parallel to belly all the while standing up tall so you don’t look like a beggar because it’s respect you’re showing to your elders & not pity & you must always respect your elders.

Onto knees once swollen or bruised you lover I lover fall onto those knees perfectly round & sexy when seen from the rips of my eyes your eyes looking at you looking at me with such silent modesty I’m almost shamed

I call it love you call it lust I call it ritual you call it marriage I call it humility you call to sadness I call it beauty you call it vain I call it awkward you call it selfish I call it lonely you call it codependent I call it codependent.

Mountain under Earth rumbling motion rumbling movement rumbling desire to have that which is strange that which is unknown that which can bring a man onto knees with blisters from the heat of the Mountain shifting weight below the outer crust of the Earth wanting so much to be freed from chains like prison like being arrested like when they take off your clothes and scrub powder like detergent onto your skin another crust without a Mountain lying beneath the surface. Earth: a pause in motion that lasts long enough for a development of some kind to occur; often this development takes the shape of an object sometimes circular or round like the shape of a knee without scars.

Saying is not showing is not enough to say that you didn’t mean to treat me like shit that you didn’t mean it at all because really you think I’m shit because I act so humble that think you should just shit all over me.

After dinner my father removing the dishes & washing the dishes so that my mother can rest from decades of work & sickness & my father humble enough to give her that small rest & my father loving enough to give help.

Little girl not wanting her little parents to be humble little girl wanting her parents to be strong & to tell all those mockers to fuck off but her parents taking heads down to bellies out of respect & fear of being mocked.

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16: Providing-for

My mother calling me daily & asking if I need if I want if it’s necessary because she can if I need or want & me always saying No but I still love you & she not wanting to hear it & always still giving & giving to me.

In our paradigm, providing does not mean subsistence, it means excess. The variation in translation is almost perfect. Families do not just want food & shelter anymore. Families want bigger shelter & richer food.

Little yellow canary chirping sweet songs until bigger yellow canary comes with regurgitated debris things when whole humans would never put in sanitary mouths but little canary chirping gratitude sweetly.

Translators translating other variations to include Enthusiasm and Excess & I wonder how simple strokes on page can be interpreted in such different ways, how one symbol can mean an infinity of meanings.

My father being a janitor & me not wanting to tell people that he’s a janitor & me wanting him to be a doctor or a lawyer but him bowing his head in submission & cleaning up other people’s shit but him bringing home a paycheck that I don’t ever see when I go to the Goodwill to buy clothes & me not even thinking that my violin lessons cost him $45 an hour & me not even thinking that he’s humbling himself to give me what I need because I’m too selfish to ever think about it. Each of the7 Deadly Sins can find a home in this hexagram when the notion of providingfor to taken to its capitalist potential. I want to blame this hexagram number 16 but really it’s capitalism that’s the problem not fate.

Wanting to be the bread-winner but not wanting a job not wanting to work caught between rocks & harder rocks you lover you’re caught & I want to get what you’re feeling & fearing but just not understanding.

& I say Being an anarchist doesn’t pay bills & you say Neither does being a writer & I say Actually it pays a helluva a lot more than being an anarchist & you say nothing & I say I can’t believe I’ve finally shut you up.

Father no longer supporting the family, the family now only husband & wife, no longer son & daughters & parents, & the children have all gone off to play & this skeleton of family is supported by my very tired mother.

Image of Mother skin blackened like catfish from chemo skin stretching so black so unnatural & hands thin bones lacking flesh coming home from work from treatment to cook & I wanting to love her only from afar.

That I lover would sink down to my knees to provide for you lover if I could not provide for you any other way that I lover I would beg if I couldn’t work lover I want you to know that begging isn’t at all above me.

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17: Following

You lover you followed me here & you will never free me from that & that I can’t follow you anywhere & that I would but that it isn’t possible & that you lover want to stay here in flatland & I lover I miss the heat of city.

He translating your fate he saying something about being bound & allegiance but also he saying something about a king pointing you to mountains & I being translator to that translator I won’t tell you your fate that way.

This number seventeen that it follows number sixteen & is before number eighteen that all of this doesn’t matter that you don’t have to worry about numbers here that seventeen can go anywhere that it doesn’t have to go anywhere that it has no home until you put it somewhere that you it is your job to do this that this is your fate not mine that it can be your fortune your story your future & yet I am still here telling you stories & translating what isn’t mine to give to you to understand Father & Mother not wanting to follow without knowledge not wanting to follow but needing to follow & so they follow people ants like herds & pushing & shoving to immigrate to brother & sister just holding hands & not even able to see & them blindly going to a land they did not know & all of this they don’t tell me & all of this I hear when they tell others & brother & sister they don’t want to remember & so they forget & about the country of heat the country once theirs. Those that have read me before you & those that did not understand & frustrated & I the obedient & I wanting to please have heard their instructions but I cannot make myself any easier for you & for that I am sorry.

Girls moving in herds like cows like birds like girls silly giggling & I watching not included & one girl giggling following another girl in the bathroom & I watching from the inside watching bitches giggling.

The obvious memory: Me at sixteen & having friends & them smoking cigarettes & me wanting to make friends permanent not erasable & so me sneaking smoking & brushing teeth to fool my parents wrongly.

Hansel & Gretel in translation is Jill & Jack & Jill & Jack following trails of crumbs up the hill & tumbling down so quickly & laughing & playing into the forest of vibrant colors & seeing something shining fire.

Girl so little as a little girl & she is watching television & she is watching the circus & little girl is impressed by acrobats & clowns & how they fly little girl watching them fly up & around & over & little girl wanting to impress her family & little girl getting her audience & laying out her blanket & little girl lining up her stuffed animals & little girl running to get a q-tip & little girl watching instructions on the television & little girl balancing on q-tip straight through eardrum.

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18: Corrupting

Mother old mother listening to daughter grown daughter listening to grown daughter cry because the mother when she was a young mother told the daughter when she was a young daughter that she was a disappointment that she wasn’t a good daughter & this daughter growing up with corruption corroded into her & believing this young mother’s words because young daughters & old daughters & really all daughters believe what their mothers say & so daughters hate mothers. The Book of Changes blaming corruption on the Father that the Father causes it all & this book forgetting about the Mother forgiving the feminine for what they can’t control & blaming men for what they can’t understand.

Being average & wanting more than average & being only what you are & wanting more that you are & watching movies & television sprouting seeds of American dreams in your brain but you still being only what you are.

That teeth no matter how hard brushed & how well clean that teeth will still hold stains like neon stains for parents to see that you’ve been smoking cigarettes & that I’m really talking about me & calling it you.

Us lovers having two cats & one making sounds like a goat like an animal it is not & the other sounding like a cat until living with us lovers & then he our orange ringtailed lemur of a cat he’s sounding just like a goat.

Girl being little but being bright & people telling her how she’s smart & special & Mother & Father telling her how she’s just like brother Big brother & little girl loving brother Big brother & him being so smart & him studying to be a doctor & little girl studying with brother Big brother for his SAT & then his MCAT & little girl taking tests with playing & little girl thinking hard for all her little answers & little girl smiling when she answers questions correctly praised. & I returning home to see Mother & Father & Mother looking so frail except for her enormous belly that it isn’t really enormous but I see it that way & her skin butterfly wings thin & her hands just bone & Father almost limping moving slowly & Father still laughing buoyantly for me & sometimes his laughter chucking open mouth & I stealing into his mouth to see a dark space where a tooth was before it was corrupted before it decayed & he had to have it removed. You corrupted & brainwashed that you have forgotten that hexagrams are read from the bottom to the top unless you haven’t forgotten & you’re reading this correctly & then I am both a poor fortune & storyteller.

Translator translating & I not liking it that it starts with the father spoiling the world & waiting for the son to fix it & so I changing fate & I saying that it will end with the mother spoiling & the daughter forgiving.

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19: Nearing

You lover it’s coming close to that time lover that things will need to come clean & I lover I am scared of what will happen when I lover when I am no longer a child & you lover you are still with me when I am older.

Jack running off & Jill on the ground & Jill screaming to Jack & Jack looking at Jill & reaching out his hand & Jill almost tip to tip almost skin but then Jack running off & not coming back & what will happen to Jill?

Last night I had again dreams that Father was here & but here wasn’t here but the city of heat & I was with Father & it was heavy with hot & I was leaving & telling him to hurry & then him getting up & falling down.

Wondering what will happen when day nears darkness & you are not tired & you are not sleepy & wondering how you will spend your evening & I your teller telling you that even cowardly Jacks should be loved.

That day you moved your body closer to my body because our bodies were so far displaced because lovers should not be separated so because you lover you couldn’t stand your life without me & sounding silly.

Earth over Swamp like that day we got lost in the swamp & I looked at maps & pointed us to high land where the earth was harder where us lovers wouldn’t loose our feet in mud & I led us back to the edge of maps.

Translator translating saying that to grieve is to remove blame & I insist that to grieve doesn’t save you from blame & even when you’re sad I’ll continue to blame & when you apologize I’ll still blame without words.

It’s the end of the world as we know it it’s the end of the world as we know it it’s the end of the world as we know it & I not feeling fine & you should not feel fine but we collectively we should be fine in death.

Little girl holding her breath & little girl filling her little lungs so full & little girl with cheeks like blowfish & little girl’s little fingers in little balls tight wound & little girl thinking of funny stories trying to think of things to distract herself & trying to count to thirty thirty-one thirty-two & little girl & thirty & exhale & little girl breathing deep a few times & wondering if it’s still there & little girl thinking it’s over & sure that it’s done & little girl breathing & hiccupping loud & I said you’re a liar you’ve always been a liar & I can’t trust a damn thing you say & sister Big sister said You spoiled brat & I said I don’t believe you I don’t believe that you really bought a plane ticket to come see me I think that you lied this whole time & what’s worse is that you don’t care that you hurt me all you care about is how our parents feel about it & I started tears & stopped for silence & sister Big sister hung up long ago & this the most honest I’ve ever been.

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20: Viewing

Angry little girl running into the sea & little girl clothed in electric blue tentacles & little girl screaming & salt water carving space in her little nose & little girl her little eyes closing & burning & opening & she sees water & blueness & stillness even though little girl is thrashing in the water & little girl her little feet only touching more electric tentacles until she can see nothing but a man hearing her scream touched her arm & took her to shore & his hand burning electricity Mother & Father from their kitchen in the city of heat looking out into the heat of the city but never seeing the heat only seeing their garden the garden that Father has built & Mother loving it & Father feeling accomplished & Mother wanting to take pictures in the garden in the hot & Father loving Mother enough to take her to the heat & sit her next to flowers & statues & Father viewing Mother through his camera & Mother smiling big & Father snapping memories quick. Back story: Jack was a lonely boy who lived in a small town where apple pies were baked everyday & one day Jack stole two apple pies & ate them very quickly & he became sick & he replaced stolen pies with sickness.

I looking at you lover & you are lovely lover & you lover you worry so greatly lover & I lover I want to love you lover & I am silly glee even at my saddest & even with my anger & I think you’re the cat’s pajamas.

William Herschel looking for Lunarians & sweeping the sky with his telescope & seeing something like a comet & calling it a comet & every night watching his comet until one day it isn’t a comet but Uranus.

You reading this & wanting to know what it means & looking for answers & I am sick of offering you answers so easy & I want you to look at this I mean really look at this & from these stories find your own future.

Image of Mother skin blackened like catfish from chemo & hands thin bones lacking any flesh returning home from work from treatment from sadness to cook dinner & I looking at Mother this way & not helping.

Image of Father man of small stature man with skin blackened from sun & fingers swollen with numbness & I holding Father’s hand & him not feeling it & so I squeeze harder & I wanting image of Father’s past.

Girls silly girls laughing & giggling & bitching & moaning & I watching these girls not part of these girls but wanting these girls & they are beautiful & I wanting to be part of them & I just viewing from far off.

Back story: Jill was a small girl who lived in a shoe with an old woman who lived in a shoe & the old woman was mean & she smelled funky like shoe funk & Jill couldn’t breathe so she ran away to a faraway land.

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ANNA MARIA HONG Cin City

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In the dumb kingdom of fear and trembling, the person with the see-through slipper knew enough to split before the other one dropped. Step and carry, bitter and better, the girl with the slipper knew better than to carry on as if all shoes were fit to be tried. Split-splat, the girl was violet in a realm of mimic green. Tremble and spot, better to have tied myself in knots, thought the girl with the one good shoe. Slip her a bitter, the person with the see-through boot renamed the kingdom “fear” after her most beloved shade of green. The good spot split, as if immaculate, and slipped into an amble thing.

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KIM HYESOON The Eye of the Cyclone

Translated by Don Mee Choi

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A poplar tree shakes its wet hair in front of a mental hospital in Ch’ŏngyangni Maybe the night wind is blowing— the wind woven with the crazy birds’ hair I place a child on each lit window and leave the hospital the-chest-crushed-child the-lungs-filled-with-stones-child fluttering-like-a-ripped-ten-fingered-fan-child the-lips-stucktogether-child the-eyeballs-melted-child the-teeth-grinded-awaychild all-of-the-ribs-crushed-child all-of-the-hair-pulled-outchild especially-all-of-the-blood-drained-into-the-sewer-child the-tongue-stretched-out-like-a-gum-child all-of-the-brainsucked-out-by-a-cat-child The crazy birds put the crowns on each other and the night sky appears round A small child stood at the window of a small house in the forest and a rabbit ran towards the house, knocked on the door, and said I hear the songs of the children Help us, help us The song that pokes my throat like a continuous hiccup In the middle of the mind of the crazy birds my children who want to return to my body and lie down the lit boat carrying the children floats silently

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JEFFREY LEVINE Two Poems

Le Corps

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There were some interesting exercises, wherein groups of six had to make a joint list of non-generative-body-part-things that turned them on. I, of course, blurted sweet potatoes.

Because in the old tales the child kills the ogre, we are the child and we are not the ogre, yet in the old tales we know perfectly well with what side of the ax we are sliced, and we take pleasure in the clarity. In the new tales, you are required to give me your milk, your sweat, your children, your house, you must give me your ideas, your thoughts—asks the blind, the innocent, the urgent—who will extinguish this extinction? From what do we feed ourselves during the famine? From feebleness, from phantoms, from our own sublimated butters, I choose her in spite of me. It is not I who choose, it is that whole kingdom of ogres. We grow up. We have an athletic body, the little ogre is diaphanous, but what happens in our house, we cannot say. In my mother’s room there are several photos of the speaker. He is young and smiling broadly, baring all his teeth, one of which is purple. 61


None of these photos look like me. Who are they? The speaker is a complex open milieu composed of other planets, a strange attractor, zone of relative instability in which a population enters, enters and exits, enters and exits, goes away. And returns. Sometime the speaker can go so far as to thrust aside his friends, his bodies, his books, as one thrusts aside a sheet, a roof, one’s strongest and most authoritarian inhabitants, but repulsion is part of the attraction, and those thrust aside end up, always, returning. In the incalculable game of our diverse revolutions all of us return, there are interradiances, Sometimes musical entanglements. Modification is constant, slight, the sky wavers. I lie in wait, an imminence, an expiring ear, A prayer to no God. And what do I find? I find: the ax, I find, the dream. I find, the worst. These are three names for the same light. I see it clearly. I love them because they have said: The worst. It is the body in the bath that finds what one need never search too far for. To say the worst is such great joy. 62


The Slender Stream with its Singing Arms There was a swift, shy, confident, anxious kiss, similar to a first kiss. The delicacy of the first kiss after the resurrection. He knew her lips in another life. Their lips regained a virginity. Four astonished lips in the dark woods.

‘

In order to tell a certain story, sometimes we must tell another story, and go so far as to burn it. We don’t do this on purpose.

‘

He runs, he flies, not daring to look back, not daring to see that she isn’t following him, she’s expecting the one he flees, the arbor of clipped hornbeam, the footbridge, the meadow, the garden path, the little wood, breaking lilac branches, the slender silent stream, and out of breath on the beach, he falls. Fear. The bench, the slender, silent stream with its singing arms, and on the other side, pain starts.

‘ 63


Distance enters while Cleopatra and Antony embrace, plunged in a now of flesh, in a sole (seul) mouth, their two souls entangled, There isn’t much to say. He merely awaits separation. That is his kingdom.

‘

She is walking on Ipanema beach at the still nonhuman hour, nude at the hour for nudity, walking so as to walk alongside the Ocean. It was the hour when mortals like to walk accompanied by the world. She becomes immense, calm, powerful, the ocean becomes tender, immense, discreet. But, from the far side of the sands came a man, running, rushed, she sees him come toward her, busy, he wants the time. She without interrupting her walk with the Ocean, he comes abreast of her, a man, and in his simple round green eyes the question. But she didn’t have time to tell him the time. Are you looking for a man? asked the man. For one second she thought: Has someone found a man?

‘

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So as to be destroyed So as to be rebuilt Is the Temple built. The doors to the world turn on their hinges Behind the mountain’s shoulder. The sky breaks open like an egg.

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LISA OLSTEIN Four Poems

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Master Thunder A fierce wind blows the wrong birds to the fields, as if to a distant shore. They land dazed, a hundred, more, near to one another, making no sound. Women set out pans of warm mash as they do for early foals. I used to tell them when they asked about the things and places I’ve seen. I remember less and less. Who am I here in this village? Who am I anywhere? In the morning they’ll charge the field with brooms to help the birds on their way.

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A Myriad Myriad Forms My eyes have adjusted to looking more and more closely. Color separates each hour. What from a distance seems a continuous plane becomes a sea of dappled islands, broken, a softness of shards. I distinguish brims of fountain basins from the water’s lapping edge, figures clothed in pine woods at dusk. A bird I remember from my childhood is standing in the road. It enters the mirage to drink, then returns to the dusty river.

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Unsated Sallow What appears smooth is feathered. What appears feathered is scaled. They are armored in perfect chain mail. Disciplined soldiers, the plates are strictly aligned no matter how riotous the pattern. Orderly farmers, neat rows span the field in straight lines. Every row a column of small squares of exact proportion. They open inward, as if each one contains a larger space inside.

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Any Such Bold Claim We are ringed by hills. I’ve taken to burying almost anything that dies— spiders, mice, birds I find in the road. This goes against local custom; here they burn. I question what I eat. How death makes it possible, but not dead long. Not too short, either. There is no beauty in this, which is what draws me. I expect certain things to correct themselves, but sheep remain dumb in bickering light. Whatever part of this can be gotten rid of, I want gone. Whatever part must be taken, taken inside.

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DAVID PETRUZELLI Abandoned House

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You heard it so many times you began to believe you were there, and of course you were there, always going inside alone and meeting a boy who was older, waiting with his own version of what had happened in that house, this very room. And by the end of the summer you knew how the first story went: the old car found in the backyard on blocks, and the bullet holes in one door, and the derby; still lying friends swore, on the front seat. Brand new, you said later, trying, on your own, to add to it, as though you had listened at night to your mother as she read the last, lights-out words of a tale: And all that remained was his hat.

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NATANIA ROSENFELD The Minder

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y minder accompanies me everywhere I go, on errands of tedium and excursions of fun—especially on excursions of fun. If I say, “This is beautiful,” she says, “No it’s not,” or else, “What do you mean, beautiful? What sort of a word is that?” If I say, “I love,” she says, “Love is a word for fools.” I took a big knife to cut my minder off, but she only grew back, bigger than before, like a fungus lump on the trunk of a tree. When she was a child, she stole my dolls. “No more imaginary games,” she said, and gave me a shot that dulled my mind, so that I could not invent identities or set the dolls dancing. If I look up into the trees, she is there, ruining the leaves, knocking down acorns. Like a monkey, but not playful. If I go swimming, she impedes the water and I start to gulp for air. When I sing, she mocks my wavering soprano until I fall silent. I need someone to help me murder her. I decide to advertise for an accomplice, but subtly. I must find a kindred spirit, who will understand the task without my stating it. If I say it exactly, my minder will read the advertisement and know it is about her. “Needed,” I write. I chew my fingers. “Needed badly.” No. “Needed: Spanish bayonet.” I found this in the dictionary; it is the name of a plant. “For cutting thickets.” No, no. A bayonet is a thing, not a person, even when disguised as a plant. And a plant can’t cut other plants. Or can it? “Wanted: companion bayonet for toothy cutting.” Better. “. . . for combating pests.” No. “Wanted: companion bayonet, discerning scissors. For climbing trees, for swimming, for duets. For spoiling the sport of the spoilsports.” The minder will know! The trees, the swimming, the 71


singing—she knows those are my favorite things. Then again, there are others: so many occasions where she appears with her finger in my face, saying, “Mind your manners,” saying, “Glutton! Sloth! Pleasure-seeker!” When I find this other person, we will rip the minder out by the roots. Like a mandrake, she’ll scream and bleed, and leave a gaping hole in my side. But we’ll sew it up, and it will heal, and I’ll be free; and my friend and I will do a dance of victory.

‘ I’ve had an answer to my advertisement! We made an arrangement to meet in the park, at noon. The minder hates noon; she shrinks into her tiny tent in the high part of the day. We’ll meet by the fountain, and it will all go from there. I’m nervous. So many have failed me. I frown, determined to present my worst face, sure this companion will fail me, too. There she is! She is looking and walking straight toward me. Her face is luminous. I can’t help it, I fall in love. I was expecting a he, not a she; I was expecting disappointment, and beetle brows— the minder in another guise, one of her many human guises. The savior who turns out to be a bloodsucker, a companion-in-arms to the minder, all hairy and blank-eyed. “I won’t stay,” says the apparition, sitting down beside me. The fountain sprays us with its soft pebbles. “I know what you need me for. When I’ve done my work, I must go. I’m sorry,” she says, caressing my shoulder. She removes a small spade from a bag at her side. She lifts my shirt on the left. My heart throbs, my skin shivers, I have never felt so exposed. Are people watching? No, all the others have disappeared, finished their lunches and gone back to their work in high offices. We are alone in the park. I think I will swoon when she touches my flesh with the spade’s pointed tip. “This will hurt,” she says. But it doesn’t. Only faintly, I can feel the spade digging deep, below my rib cage. It feels like music heard far away, or people’s voices when you lie feverish in your childhood bed. I am looking in her eyes, and she is 72


looking in mine. Her eyes are green; fronds wave in their depths. Yes, it hurts, but not badly. Suddenly, I hear a screaming, I feel a flailing; I see a gnarled root, like a hunk of ginger. I see the face of my minder, crumpling. She hisses a last admonishment: “No love! No lo---.” But it is too late: she’s done for! The beautiful companion turns from me to look at the park. “We need a place to bury her,” she says. “Do you want me to find it?” The gnarled root has shrunk to the size of a thumb in her hand. “Let’s throw her in the fountain and make a wish!” I reply, excited, triumphant. And I toss her over my shoulder, facing away from the water, not even looking. I sing a song, voicing all my wishes for the life ahead. My companion sings with me: a duet, only she sings in another language, one I can’t understand. My nerves understand it, though; beneath my skin, my nerves tingle with an unknown clarity. When the song is over, my beautiful companion takes out needle and thread. The thread is light pink, thick and soft. I don’t feel the silver piercing, though I feel the thread move in and out like flesh of my flesh. I look down; the stitches are invisible, the wound is already puckered. My companion, without a word, has vanished. In the water, a handful of dust rises to the surface and dissolves. I take my first, wobbling steps out of the park. In years to come, I will check the wound in times of distress. It never throbs, but I can feel slight bumps beneath my fingers, far more reassuring than complete smoothness. As for the companion: she lives with me now; that is, she lives inside me and sings when I sing, in her other language—a language whose incomprehensible sounds rhyme with all the words I utter.

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AURELIE SHEEHAN Small Animal

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ara herself did not know the people throwing the party, but she went to the house in the woods anyway. He was darkly charming. Very dark. In other words seemingly land-based, mineral in taste, slick like black mud. He carried with him a small something wrapped in a blanket. The blanket was gray and thin, as if it had been well used, well loved by a baby. He had folded it with some care. It reminded her, at first, of the burrito wrapping instructions she’d seen at a Tucson restaurant. Anyone can learn to wrap a burrito. Anyone can wrap a baby blanket. But around what? He went about the business of being at a party like anyone else—being dark, being of the earth, being not particularly washed but charming nonetheless. He ate a chip, dropping a bit of the dip to the floor. He shook hands with other new residents from the artists’ colony. He talked to a man who seemed to belong here, was perhaps from town. But all the while he held this little blanket. Sara often felt feverish at parties, or like a ticking bomb, as if she were holding her breath and could only be there so long before she would burst and die. The feeling was worse than usual that night, though the beer had already done something to the back of her neck, and if she drank enough of it, and a second one, she would perhaps, as they say, loosen up. Would she need to talk about what she did, about being a poet? After all, it wasn’t like home, at Trader Joe’s, where she remained aloofly cheerful with the rest of the Hawaiian shirts. Where, by dint of her money job, she could hide her true self. Had anyone asked him about the little bundle? Maybe it was some kind of injury actually, something that required discretion. Sara shook her head—she was muddled! Of course it couldn’t be an injury: it was outside of himself. But it could be a kind of device to help with an injury, she pleaded silently, impressed from an emotional if not logical perspective. It could be a sort of organ, an artificial organ

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that pumped and excreted fluids. Try as she might she couldn’t help but be fascinated and frightened, and to study the man holding the blanket. Carhartt pants in of-the-earth brown, worn through time. An oil-slicked jacket, rugged boots, a kind of Middle Eastern checked scarf, lashed around his neck, half falling. And his hair, not thoroughly or recently washed. But still fetching somehow, even as it stood up a bit on one side. It carried some sunlight in it, some hope. She drained her beer. Now they were talking together, laughing, as if they were old friends. They laughed and spoke, and she kept her eyes away from the blanket he held to his chest with tender, paternal insistence. His voice was awkward, not out of ignorance or foreignness, but as if he didn’t use it much, because he was different, had slipped from the norm into his own universe. The dips and the languishing in the words, the sentences—that’s what she liked. She found herself simply talking about anything, asking him unnecessary questions. She laughed, giddily, unnecessarily, at herself. There were other things to like, as well. The peculiar vulnerability of his gaze, as if he were near tears, as if he were whispering, trust me, lay down with me. And the way—here, at a party!— he stretched, beddy-bye time, unfurling his one free arm, curving his back and then becoming tall again. It was late. The lights in the house were now confined to corners. There was still wine in a couple of bottles in the kitchen, and someone had left a half-empty six-pack. The other people in the house were vague shadows. And here he was asking if she’d like to see his studio—for he, too, was an artist, a sculptor, this a grand new world for her, the poet from Trader Joe’s.

‘ The room was filled with elaborate and indefinable equipment. It was an industrial space, a converted barn or garage, the walls streaked with black and rust, the floor pooled with oil. He took off his blackened, ancient coat, somehow maneuvering the gray bundle so he never had to let go. Underneath he wore a black shirt, big for him, smeared in one place with white paint or Gesso. 75


Upstairs in the loft, the bed turned out to be the only place to sit down. From the floor nearby, he picked up a jug of homemade wine. A neighbor had made it, he told her, pouring the dark, watery wine into green glasses—the bottom half of Rolling Rock bottles, cut and polished. Soon his breath, like hers, was of the homemade wine. She adjusted herself on the bed, fidgeting. They had become quieter. It was almost inevitable. But there was this one small thing between them—wrapped in a blanket. What is it? she whispered, again. For she had asked before, and he had just laughed. Now he placed the bundle on the quilt between them and unwrapped it carefully. She was giddy, nauseous, anxious, aroused. What would it be? Treasure? But as the second fold unwrapped she was aware of a small shape underneath, a shadowy delicate shape. He lifted the last fold, and there it was. A white ferret. It had been a white ferret. Its head was stretched forward and its pink gums and the bottoms of its multiplicity of teeth were exposed, a small whine or grimace. The neck was twisted, boneless, and the rest of the body had hunched and frozen. The legs and the hands of the thing—for they looked like hands, tiny hands—were bony and rigid and somehow also like twigs, birds—anything but what they were, what it was, on the bed, between them! As if they understood something together, as if now they must trust each other, he looked down, tenderly wrapped up his bundle again. Would she be going, he asked. The night was black; her entire body thrummed with blackness. It was as if someone had shown her ugly pictures of herself, or as if she were not herself, had no real life of her own. Now his hand was on her leg, and now his hand was unbuttoning the top of her jeans, then unzipping them. His palm was illuminated and rough against her belly, her hip, tugging against the tightness of the fabric. The two of them accommodated to one another; she was making it possible for him. The little bundle lay on the plywood shelf, near the green bottle glasses, and darkness came in like someone was throwing gallons of black water from the skylight, splashing her, soiling them, and their hands fumbled against

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clothing, fumbled and crept and slunk in to feel skin. Everything came off now, except her socks, and she felt like a small animal there on the quilt, as he unlaced her, as he separated, pushed at her legs to spread them and then, his whole body a question, entered her, made her squeak with pleasure. Here, in this strange part of the country, fog came in the morning, a white purifying mist. She descended the loft stairs, his body a felled tractor and her body weirdly light; she’d become smaller. She cinched his black and white scarf around her waist to keep her pants from falling. She couldn’t find her shoes anywhere, so she rolled up her pants and tiptoed out into the white dawn, placing one then the other bare foot on the cold wet grass of the field. And there were fieldstones, and there was mud, and she ran, like a little gazelle, rid of herself, all the way back to her apartment on the other side of the compound.

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RICHARD SIKEN Fryderyk Zajac

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1: The Dead Man’s Desk Twenty-eight loose handwritten pages, unnumbered but stacked carefully in the corner; a lamp; three fountain pens and two bottles of ink, one brown, one black; loose tobacco; an ashtray shaped like a clamshell; four hand-rolled cigarettes; eight wooden matches; nine coins equaling 61 groszy; a letter opener; one key, two bone buttons, a watch with a leather band, one third of a bar of dark chocolate; and an empty water glass—that’s what they found on his desk when the landlord let the police into the room. The twenty-eight pages turned out to be a long poem titled “Procession,” written in the author’s own hand. Not his best work, but his last, esoteric and mostly unfollowable, written in a coded, private language, with repetitions of snow and white roses, remarkable for both its perfect penmanship and almost total disregard for its readership, as if the intended audience was a population not quite human; but still significant, especially significant because of a certain passage eleven pages in that describes a scene in which a man closely resembling the author himself is found dead on a park bench, snow slowly falling on his dark coat, which is pretty much how they found him, the author, dead on a park bench, the snow slowly falling. Angelic script, says the policeman, lifting the pages, feeling their heft, and he wonders what he means because it isn’t, it’s just handwriting. His partner nods but ignores him. Not his best work, certainly, but interesting: a park bench, white roses, the bodies floating upward, always upward, trails in the air, wisps of smoke, hardly there, nothing really, and the snow falling, and the dark coat.

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2: The Worm King’s Lullaby 1773 was a difficult year for Polish mystics, not that there were many, nor should there have been, but the Enlightenment was changing everything, and probably for the better, but the cultural mind that was concerning itself with reason and ethics, government and logic, seemed to have little patience for irrationality and superstition. And why should it? He didn’t expect it to. And yet, it wasn’t his fight, though he didn’t have a grudge against the new direction, didn’t even subscribe to the old direction, but Fryderyk Zajac—destined to write the long poem Procession, among other mystical works—found the whole thing a little tiresome. He walks the parks of Krakow—not even a Polish town anymore, having been partitioned by Austria the year before—and thinks to himself. The world is crazy. Let them follow Reason. Let them capitalize the word, maybe that will help. Let the polis bury the Dark Ages, its tyranny and doubtful traditions, but how can I help them? I can’t. And it’s true, he can’t. His hands glow in the dark. His handwriting changes with his moods. Reason, a great idea. Reason, not his idea. He’s writing a poem—well, a book of poems—about losing. Losing everything and losing well. It’s a book about war, really, a noble war, but you lose anyway. You lose and you lose and you lose and you lose and then the worms eat you and apologize for having to do it.

go ahead and sleep now, you can sleep now, we won’t eat you, you’re not fat enough, we won’t turn your pillow into mulch yet, we won’t let the bolts rust, we won’t let the wrench fall into the straight jacket of your white pajamas or let the mushrooms bloom in your head yet, we won’t be the only feeling

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in your chest yet, we will bide our time, we will let your heart wag like the tail of a dog for now, or wiggle like a little worm, like one of us, like something starving for a little lump of meat, you see, it is our nature to devour you with love and make ourselves at home inside you, there’s nothing you can do about it, nothing you can do to stop us, but it isn’t time yet, we aren’t ready yet, so close your eyes and sleep now, you can sleep now, you can sleep

I am an unreasonable man, he thinks to himself, walking through the park, then laughs out loud, which scares a blackbird out of a nearby tree.

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3: The Fulcrum Like the all-night bonfires of St. John’s Day, midsummer, marking the solstice in the open-air garden, or the candle-lit wreaths that float down the Vistula, sore and gold in the dark brown river, or the low moon stuck behind the municipal tower, where the trumpet sounds out each full hour, they glow, these hands, they flicker and ache, pulse like a dowser near underground water. Night Watch or Day Watch, the world makes what it needs out of what it has, puts knobs on the doors and invents the hands to turn them, gently, gently, with a voluntary kindness, the least amount of pressure necessary. There is a button, and there is a shoulder, the hand does work, finds a fit for a moment, as energy follows thought, as the key finds the lock, the pain, weak weld welded again, the fulcrum transacted, the door shut. There is no perfection. The hand is sore, a lack, a loneliness, finds its theater and keeps the pendulum swinging. There is no perfect place, we swing, we pivot, a handle, a lever. To be in the world and of it, make it, help it wind itself up again. There is a button, and there is a shoulder, and sometimes a knife, and sometimes a rock. Here is a brick with blood on it. Here is a brick with no blood. The night is a river, brown river, we swim. Tell me where to put them. Let them hurt until I put them. Because the world wants to be touched. Because the world makes what it needs. Because it needs a push, a nudge.

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4: Transfer Objective truth, systematic thinking, and the scientific method. Lamps shining in a dark room. If you trust yourself, that is. I don’t see right, not always, blurry sometimes, the wrong colors. They die, these people, mostly they die, and the colors flash. Death is simply too much change at once. If you could take the stress, the trauma, and stretch it over space or time. If you could. I put my hands on the colors and send them somewhere, try not to be noticed, don’t know where it goes. There’s a blue in your heart and a green underneath it. There’s red on your forehead and pink at your neck. Let it move, move through you and leave no trace, the wind, be the tree and rustle, blur, make a noise and be finished with it. Brace yourself. Unbrace. Embrace.

Go to sleep. You can sleep now. You can rest your head here. You can rest your head and close your eyes. You can close your eyes now. You can close your eyes and dream. Because I’m still right here. And I’m telling you a story about the worms. But I won’t let them get you. It’s a happy story. See,

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the worms never get you. They just keep on not getting you. Because of me. Because I’m not going anywhere. So you see the worms are at a complete disadvantage.

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5: Then Gently, gently, with a voluntary kindness, the hand does the work because the world needs to be touched. There is a button, and there is a shoulder, and there is a darkness, and there is something on the other side. Darkness like a shadow thrown across a field, pulled with one hand and thrown with the other, boats in the river, birds in flight. The birds, dark birds, they fly from his hand to land . . . elsewhere. So many darknesses thrown into the future. Someone else’s problem. The garden is covered in snow. Dark coats falling out of the sky.

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6: And Flew

and flew and flew and flown flying fell and swooped and fell wheeled dropped and wheeled again and flew and flew they flew and they flew further and farther faster and slower and they dropped and rose and rose higher and they flew onward into more flying their wings beat and beat and beat as they fly and fly and fly and rise and drop rise and drop

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KIERAN SUCKLING Frogs

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Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

—William Shakespeare

he suspect was “not your average maggot-looking dope dealer on the corner.” At least that’s what the police say. It was 1994, and he was arrested for possession of bufotenine, a Schedule 1 drug under the California Controlled Substances Act. The drug in question came in the form of four toads—Hanz, Franz, Peter, and Brian—that the suspect intended to smoke. Not the entire toad, but, as has been known to happen in fairy tales, its skin. More specifically, the parotid gland at the back of Hanz’s head would be milked, dried, and smoked, causing our suspect to inform the police that he could “hear electrons jumping orbitals in his molecules.”1 California outlawed bufotenine in 1970, but the toad smoker was the first to be arrested and charged under this law, probably because of a curious bufotenine panic in the early 1990s. News of hippie Australian toad lickers hit the U.S. press with the Toronto News screeching “Licking Toad a Dangerous New Craze,” the Guardian proclaiming “It’s Repulsive and Highly Dangerous,” and the Los Angeles Times warning that “Licking a Toad Is the Latest Way to Hallucinate.”2 A grave threat to America’s future was at hand and state legislators took swift action. “They say these frogs grow to the size of a dinner plate,” said Rep. Patrick Harris of South Carolina explaining his anti-bufotenine bill, “I don’t want to see somebody walk across the Statehouse grounds with a frog on a leash and pick him up and lick him.”3 Indeed. State representative Beverly Langford warned Georgia legislators of “the extreme dangers of toad licking becoming the designer drug of choice in today’s sophisticated society” and asked the state to determine if toad licking should be classed as a sex

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crime. 4 Both legislators were referring to the giant marine toad (Bufo marinus) whose natural range stretches from Texas through Mexico and Central America to the Amazon Basin of South America, but was introduced in Florida, the Caribbean, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Australia. However, all of the more than two hundred species in the Bufo genus—including Europe’s common toad (Bufo vulgaris) for which the compound was named—contain bufotenine. There isn’t a pet shop in the United States and few ten-year-old boys that have not illegally possessed bufotenine. The Wall Street Journal noted the arrest in a story bearing the headline “Toad-Smoking Gains on Toad-Licking among Drug Users,” and indeed the arrest set off an unlikely war between adherents of licking and smoking. The latter asserted that bufotenine is unlikely to be psychoactive, and, if it is, the toxic effects, especially combined with the orally active bufotoxins and bufodienolides, would threaten the life and health of any would-be enthusiast long before a potential ecstatic state would set in.5 They promote another compound, 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MEO-DMT), as a more compelling hallucinogen. 5-MEO-DMT is present in only the Sonoran Desert toad (Bufo alvarius), is active only if smoked, and the smoking eliminates other toxic compounds. Scientists believe 5-MEO-DMT is one of the most powerful hallucinogens found in nature and perhaps the only hallucinogen present in an animal. Hanz, Franz, Peter, and Brian were Sonoran Desert toads and clearly destined for the pipe. The lickers point out that while the Sonoran Desert toad’s range extends only from southeastern California to southwestern New Mexico and south to Sinaloa, archeological artifacts, linguistic associations, and folk stories from around the world suggest a hallucinogenic use of toads and toadstools. Though the Sonoran Desert toad inspired the Arizona-based Church of the Toad of Light, and may have been traded by Native Americans into parts of Central and South America (though physical evidence is lacking), it cannot explain the consistent worldwide association of toads and transformative/psychedelic experiences, from Mayan burial rituals to the Temple at Delphi, Chinese ch’an su medicine, and European frog prince stories. Scientific research, which has primarily been carried out

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on murderers, schizophrenics, and LSD-addicted rats, has not been terribly helpful. The rats showed some proclivity to press a button marked “LSD” when given bufotenine, but the results were not statistically significant. The murderers and schizophrenics, busy with nausea, retching, vomiting, nystagamus, and their skin’s turning “the color of eggplant,” pressed no LSD buttons. One nearly drowned in her own saliva, another had to be resuscitated. Nasty stuff, but they undoubtedly experienced hallucinogenic sights and visions. One subject confessed: “Words can’t come. My mind feels crowded. When I start on a thought, another one comes along and clashes with it. . . I am here and not here.” Another recovered a suppressed memory from age three of seeing her mother dying of a uterine hemorrhage. More recently, self-experimenters have demonstrated hallucinogenic bufotenine effects in carefully controlled environments.6 Whether the California legislature was mistaken in outlawing bufotenine, our suspect was the first person prosecuted for toad frolicking since Maria de Illara in 1611.7 De Illara, a sixty-nineyear-old Basque woman, confessed that the devil had instructed her to pound up toads in water and rub the ointment upon her chest down to her navel and in her armpits to obtain the power of flight. Flying ointments were well known in Europe and typically included plants in the nightshade family, especially henbane, jimson weed, belladonna, and mandrake. They contain atropine and scopolamine (6,7-epoxytropine tropate), powerful but deadly hallucinogens. They often included mashed toad as well. Dosage is critical to survival and difficult to control orally, so the ointment was sometimes placed on the end of stick or the handle of a broom or pitchfork and then inserted into the vagina, giving rise to the image of witches flying on broomsticks.8 The first toad trial, which was also the first witch trial in England, took place in 1566.9 Elizabeth Francis received from her grandmother a toad that, through dark contrivance, had been transformed into a cat named Sathan. It could be compelled “by pricking her hand or face and putting the blood in his mouth which he sucked.” Applying toad secretions to a wound was and is a method of bufotenine ingestion.10 With a blood offering/cat-bufotenine ingestion, Elizabeth bade Sathan to bewitch a certain Andrew Byles. Sathan agreed but

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stipulated that Byles should “abuse” her before marriage. The deal was struck, the abuse rendered, but Byles refused to marry. Sathan killed him, then counseled Elizabeth on the use of an herbal abortive, probably ergot, another dangerous hallucinogen. Compelled again, Sathan bewitched Christopher Francis to marriage. It didn’t end well. The official record tells us that the couple “lived not so quietly as she desyred, beinge stirred to much unquietnes and moved to swearing and cursinge.” At Elizabeth’s bidding Sathan killed their infant daughter, turned himself into a toad, and hid in Christopher’s shoe. Upon touching the not-so-hapless toad with his toe, Christopher became incurably lame. Elizabeth traded Sathan to Agnes Waterhouse for a sweet cake. Mother Waterhouse was, unfortunately, prone to neighborly quarrels and in short time bade Sathan to drown one neighbor’s cow and another’s geese. Hogs were similarly dispatched and butter curds made to be lost. She was generous to Sathan, however, for in each instance he was given not only a drop of blood but a whole chicken that “he ate up clean . . . and she could find remaining neither bones nor feathers.” Confessing to two murders and a hobbling, Elizabeth Francis was sentenced to two years in jail.11 Agnes Waterhouse denied being a witch but admitted to conspiring with Sathan against livestock and curds. She was hanged by the neck on July 29, 1566. Though it was not unheard of for medieval Europeans to put animals on trial, this was not Sathan’s fate. Upon hearing the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, he reverted to a toad and hopped away. Bewitching, toads, and marriage continue to intersect in modern tellings of the “Frog Prince” and some versions of “Beauty and the Beast.” The stories play out very differently in the United States and Europe. Although I don’t disagree that an excessive and narrow morality has simplified and sanitized the American versions,12 it’s worth noting that this critique has largely been developed from an anthropocentric perspective that deprives the frog of biological properties and the ability to actively participate in the human drama. The frog is reduced to a symbol. Such thoroughgoing and naive humanism would have been inconceivable to the early tellers of these tales. A pharmacological—or better, ecological—perspective adds depth to the stories and their evolution.

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A petulant princess drops a golden ball down a well. A frog offers to retrieve it but only if the princess promises to let him be her companion, to dine at her table, to sleep in her bed. She falsely agrees, takes the ball, and runs back to her castle, leaving the frog behind. The frog eventually makes his way to the castle, where the king forces the disgusted princess to keep her promise. In a German version she grabs the frog as it tries to enter her bed and smashes him against the wall screaming, “Now you’ll get your rest, you disgusting frog!” The violent act breaks an evil spell unknown to the princess, transforming the frog into his original form, a handsome prince. In a British version she beheads the frog. In a Polish version the frog is replaced by a snake, which is cut in two. A Lithuanian version has her burn the snake’s skin. A Russian “Beauty and the Beast” story reverses the genders and has the prince burn the female toad’s skin. In American versions the princess places him on her pillow or compassionately kisses him. So we’re back to lickers versus smokers (and perhaps cutters). In either case, while the stories have irreducible gender, fatherdaughter, and marriage themes, they also have an irreducible ecological theme. Animals become human and humans become animal. The transformation/insight is not accomplished by word magic but by kissing, licking, smoking, ingesting, and even appreciating the other. Bufotenine, like other powerful compounds, can cross the species boundary because it is an analog to human serotonin. It and the human brain are structured and biologically destined to interact. But the possibility of interacting is becoming increasingly remote, even impossible. The Sonoran Desert toad is an endangered species in California. It’s been extirpated from the state since the 1970s. Toad smoker got his from Arizona. The human experience of the species has gone extinct for most Californians. Tuolumne County, where the arrest occurred, is home to the California red-legged frog, made famous by Mark Twain as the Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County. Once abundant enough to support eighty thousand diners a year in San Francisco, it was placed on the federal endangered species list in 1996. There will be no more licking or eating, and very little seeing or hearing, of the California red-legged frog. It was long ago replaced at jumping frog contests by exotic bullfrogs. A third Calaveras resident, the foothill yellow-legged frog, is in the process

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of being placed on the endangered list. “Beauty and the Beast” stories changed dramatically in the twentieth century, focusing less on the beauty’s redeeming and civilizing of the beast and more on the beast’s animal dignity and struggle to survive.13 This should come as no surprise. Fairy tales evolve to communicate the existential situation of the communities that tell them. That situation is less a matter of received values and beliefs than it is an engagement with the real. In our world, where the plant and animal foundations of our symbols and metaphors are increasingly threatened with extinction and the assumptions of humanism appear increasingly barren, fairy tales cannot but reexamine the human-animal relation.

End Notes 1. Information about the couple’s case comes from Modesto Bee, “Toads Bring a New Look to Drug Bust,” January 6, 1994; Modesto Bee, “Delay in Toad Case,” March 2, 1994; New York Times, “Couple Avoids Jail in Toad Extract Case,” May 1, 1994. 2. The Guardian, “Getting Their Kicks and Licks on the Toad to Rack and Ruin,” July 11, 1990; Toronto Star, “Licking Toads a Dangerous New Craze,” January 21, 1990; Los Angeles Times, “Toad Licking Leaves More than a Bad Taste in the Mouth,” January 31, 1990. 3. Mitchell Landsberg, “Legislators Toady to Chickens, Marmots,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1990. 4. The Guardian, “Getting Their Kicks and Licks on the Toad to Rack and Ruin,” July 11, 1990; Cox News Service, “His Story Has Warts in It,” February 14, 1990. 5. See T. Lyttle, D. Goldstein, and J. J. Gartz, “Bufo Toads and Bufotenine: Fact and Fiction Surrounding an Alleged Psychedelic,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 28, no. 3 (1996): 267‹N›90; Wade Davis and Andrew T. Weil, “Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,” Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1992): 51‹N›59; and Davis, Shadows in the Sun.

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6. See J. Ott, “Pharmanopo-psychonautics: Human Intranasal, Sublingual, Intrarectal, Pulmonary and oral Pharmacology of Bufotenine,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 33, no. 3 (2001): 273‹N›81; and Alexander T. Shulgin and Ann Shulgin, Tihkal: The Continuation (Berkeley, Calif.: Transform Press, 1997). 7. Adrian Morgan, Toads and Toadstools: The Natural History, Folklore, and Cultural Oddities of a Strange Association (Berkeley, Calif.: Celestial Arts, 1995). 8. Ibid.; Andrew Sherratt, “Flying up with the Souls of the Dead,” British Archeology 15, June 1996. 9. Willyam Powell, “The examination and confession of certaine Wytches at Chensforde in the Countie of Essex before the Quenes majesties Judges, the XXVI daye of July Anno 1566,” in Marion Gibson, Early Modern Witches: Witchcraft Cases in Contemporary Writing (London: Routledge, 2000). 10. Morgan, Toads and Toadstools. 11. Five years after being released from prison, Elizabeth Francis was again found guilty of witchcraft. Though England had a two-strikes-you’re-out witchcraft policy, she was mysteriously sentenced to only a year in jail. Six years after she was released, she stood trial for witchcraft yet again and this time was sentenced to death. See “A Detection of damnable driftes, practized by three Witches arraigned at Chelmisforde in Essex, at the laste Assises there holden, which were executed in Aprill 1579” in Gibson, Early Modern Witches. 12. See E. W. Harries, “The Violence of the Lambs,” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies 19, no. 1 (2005): 54‹N›66, and Don Haase, “German Fairy Tales and America’s Cultural Wars: From Grimm’s Kinder-und Hausmarchen to William Bennett’s Book of Virtues,” German Politics and Society 13 (Fall 1995): 17‹N›25. 13. Marina Warner, “Go Be a Beast: Beauty and the Beast II,” in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). In Jon Scieszka’s The Frog Prince Continued, the unhappily married couple kisses again and both people happily turn into frogs.

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LEE UPTON Three Poems

 Beastly Beast Even if he was a bull angel, a land whale, a million tumblers of blubber, a horned prevaricator, it took dirty tricks to get him. He put up only one sign: No soliciting. His blunder: to be generous to a fault, his own fault only. He took his body to extremes, packed snow around his harvested heart. Doper, crackhead, meth scout. A rabbit washes her face in his mouth. The bolt that once held art braces a condemned man under stairs. Sunlight leaches a tapestry to the color of tea. A daughter is bartered easily.

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The Forest of Thorns It’s odd, such persistence, as in the story of the sick woman visited by her robust neighbor. A week later the neighbor dies and the sick woman is well enough to attend the funeral. The thorns never shrank fully into the earth. Thorns thicken after they’re sliced. The daughter of the needle is the knife.

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The Shadow Must Find Its Shadow The shadow wants to climb walls, to escape above the bed, to escape being sewn like a veil. Even a shadow must tear at last, retract its necklace of skulls and bats. Until then, the shadow adores the wall and prefers not to be without it. It’s the shadow of a bear as much as of a boy, yet wilder than a bear or a boy. Even a shadow wants its liberty free of the body that bore it, free of its little father.

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JULIE MARIE WADE Maidenhead

i



t all begins with Red. She was a good girl, couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, nothing on her mind but an innocent visit to Grandmother’s house. Problem with the child isn’t that she’s vain but that she’s vulnerable—or so the story instructs us to believe. She has a showy red cape and a pretty red mouth and legs growing longer by the hour. She isn’t afraid of her body, like they tell us in books. She likes it: little sounds it makes, way it bends into the wind and curls up on the bed and climbs things, straddles them. She thinks to herself, I’m part boy and part cat, I can do anything, and thinking this way, she can. One of the things Red does best is playing hardto-get. She likes keep-away, too: all that jazz. So it occurs to me that the wolf might not be your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, woodsy-type predator. Rather, he might stand in for a certain shy lad out to take his revenge. “You broke my heart!” he howls at the midday sun, muted enough to resemble a moon. She takes the locket he gave her—gold, with a picture inside—and grinds it to dust under the point of her shoe. “No,” she says, curling her lip, “now I’ve broken your heart.”

Somewhere in Nashville tonight

some two are about to be

sorely

disappointed

Same is true of Cincinnati, Cleveland.

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Pittsburgh even: largest city in Appalachia—

where the Monongahela and the Allegheny

(and a few furtive lovers) awkwardly unite

Sure, you’ve heard about gettin’ lucky in Kentucky, you’ve heard Virginia is for lovers, you’ve heard But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

‘ I was supposed to be guarding it. Vigilant. Watch towers, crows’ nests. A pair of PermaFocus Free Wide Angle binoculars. I was supposed to sound the alarm at any sign of intrusion. Kicking and screaming. Movie theatres, parking lots. A Z-force 300,000 volt stun gun. “What is it?” “What is what?” “The it. The treasure.” “Why, your most precious gift, you silly goose—the irreplaceable gift of your girlhood.” I heard hood, and I wanted it—oh how I wanted it—that elegant, velveteen cowl. Scarlet. Turquoise. Chartreuse. Salmon. (Best crayons of the 64-piece set.) Or that deep ecclesiastical Purple, like cloth draped over the cross at Lenten service.

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“When can I have it?” “What?” “My girl hood. Is it coming by post? Will I have to sign?” “But darling, you’ve always had it. You’re born with it.” “What do you mean?” “It’s innate.” Like ornate, word I knew better. This body of mine: pert and new and green as a Christmas tree: gangly. But what of the ornaments—garland and tinsel? jingling bells? Where does this girl hood go? Dot has a dilemma. She keeps meeting the wrong kind of men: nobrainers, barbarians, buffoons. Whole series of tedious encounters. Her pleasure-quest culminates in an opium den. What would Jocelyn Elders do? she wonders, wading through the rainbow-floral haze. There was a special on cable just before the cyclone struck. If only she had ordered the Sue Johanson Royal Wizard for $49.95 plus tax (S & H not included). It would be here by now, here in her hot little hand. If only. But the drag queen in the pink gown and glittering crown knows better, suggests the essential accoutrement has been with her all along. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain, to the misfits you’ve harbored between your emerald sheets. “Close your eyes, darling. Clear your mind. Tap your euphemism at least three times.” Waving her Hitachi Wand and smiling grandly. New basket sticker for a hot air balloon: floating away, Magic Happens. “Repeat as needed. The power is yours. Be happy, my dear, ever after.” Somewhere in the Smoky Mountains— Or the San Fernando Valley— Or the Grand Teton Wildlife Preserve—

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He in black, She in white, world between them sedimentary gray How not to be hood-winked into believing this life better than the last:

chance meeting, changed name, close quarters on the honeymoon cruise…

The little snickers, the faux blush Her mother’s friend who wrapped a shiny box of air: Wear this on your wedding night, and everything will be all right All that close scrutiny, all those danders up White lace garter pinching at her thigh Bouquet tossed strategically away There was once a raven-haired woman—young but wise—old enough at least to know better. Night before the ceremony, she broke into a flush, which on closer inspection revealed a wicked case of hives. Whole body blistered red, emergency room for a swollen tongue, her breath choked in: quick gasps, hasty swallows. And the doctor said, “You might want to re-think this thing,” or something to that effect, but she was stubborn (more stubborn than she was wise), and so she married him the next morning, patchy skin concealed beneath her requisite white. Did they ever talk about it? Did he touch the places her body had (strategically) rejected him? Seven months later, they parted ways. She bit her tongue then, clamped it tight. All the things she could have said but chose— stubbornly, again—not to say.

‘ I was the only child: my mother’s daughter, my father’s son… Whosoever thou needest me to be It was unclear from the beginning, however, to whom my body belonged. 99


Did they own that also? Was there a mortgage coming due? And who were these people really? Strangers . . . the only strangers I happened to know

Miss

Mrs.

Ms.

Mr.

(circle one)

“What she really needs is a good roll in the hay.” “Who?” “No one.” “What does that mean?” “Will you give us a minute please?” “Why?” “Outside. Now.” The Strangers are talking: He in soft tones, She in harsher

(worlds between us, walls)

What I know about hay amounts to very little. I know it can give you “fever” in the springtime, fresh pollen-clouds rising from my mother’s flowers. I know it is sometimes gathered and rolled—is that what they meant?—into bales, which we see as we drive down the Oregon coast on our way to summer vacation. But when I look up “bale” in my desktop Merriam-Webster dictionary, I learn it is a noun meaning first, “great evil,” and second, “woe or sorrow.” These definitions trouble me, turning suddenly sinister those wide curious carpets of cut grass cured for fodder. And what about hayrides and haystacks—that miraculous rock formation off the coast of Cannon Beach? Were those evil too? Was there something sorrowful lurking in the inter-tide, pooled among the chitons and star fish and fuchsia-bright sea anemones?

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This

That

The Other

All of the Above

(circle one)

“Time to hit the hay,” my parents chime, And my bottom lip trembles a little.

I bite my tongue then, clamp it tight.

The next morning I summon my courage and ask: “Why is the Needle in the Haystack so terribly hard to find?”

Rose had grown accustomed to the thorny silence of her suburban neighborhood. A much wished-for child, born of her parents’ substantial posterity complex, she was doted upon by her elders and ceaselessly praised for her many talents. From an early age, she donned a frilly apron and served Chardonnay and light hors d’oeuvres to household visitors, later entertaining them with piano solos and poetic recitations. The question may here be raised whether in fact everything which is meant to happen must, but in this case, let us suspend our disbelief. Let us continue to imagine there are indeed inescapable fates. Rose’s father did not want his only daughter confused by “unclean thoughts.” Rose’s mother did not want her only daughter tempted by “bodily desires.” They feared Exposure as an unsafe place: kingdom overrun by beasts and briars. As a consequence, their child was not permitted to watch Melrose Place or venture far from the yard unattended. “You have the whole garden and a tetherball set. What more could any girl want?” But in the end, she found the window-well, breaking through its spidery glass. In the end, she found the high gate and pried the rusted padlock free, despite its camouflage of burrs and bees and lilacs. Like all children, she had a yearning to find the Terrible transformed to something magical—the Grotesque redeemed, the frog made beautiful on its own amphibian terms. She read Siddhartha

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and felt betrayed, but in the morning when she woke, for the first time she knew she was really awake: splintered as a sand dollar, unsure who to blame, but finally and truly awake. Somewhere in the Heartland,

or the Deep South,

some two (or three (or four discover the sticky mix of sex and vinyl moment

curse the air conditioner

failed at a crucial

And somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, in a ferry boat bathroom— or New England, in an untended apple orchard, long past picking season—

these bodies:

bent the way of wind, curled the way of bed

And the lie all lovers tell themselves, at least once, lapping easily in the inter-tide: that we invented this, that what we do has never been done before, and never better The hood. The wink. The smirk in the bedroom mirror. What to make of the Rumplestiltskin who emerges (in each of us)

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during these most intimate times? What straw, what flax, have I transformed for you, Beloved— What price will I exact in return? This love—muddled by lust, enmeshed in compensation—with eyes shut tight or gaping wide, amazed

It seems

in the end

such a thing to ask:

No matter who you are to each other No matter how many times you have asked before

‘ I had seen The Sound of Music thirty-six times. Taped off network television onto static-thick VHS. I was interested in becoming a nun like Fraulein Maria, or royalty like Baroness Schraeder. I was interested in wearing a uniform and blowing a whistle and taking a wife. I was interested in dancing during a rainstorm inside a glassenclosed gazebo.

This

That

The Other

All of the Above

(circle one)

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There was, however, a glitch in the tape where my father had tried to edit out commercials. Just before the culminating scene— Captain Von Trapp about to kiss (and shush) the still-crooning Fraulein Maria—a portion of a douche commercial cut in. A striking young woman wearing a flowered sun dress and no shoes sat on her verandah playing the cello. The voiceover came through warbled, but the brand name was clear—Summer’s Eve—which made sense given that it was also a summer’s evening at the Austrian estate where Captain Von Trapp and Fraulein Maria professed their love, proclaiming they “must have done something good.” In my mind, the two became conflated: douching and doing something good. Also: douching and playing the cello, another sound of music. Douche: a cleansing fluid flushed through the vagina as a hygienic measure; often used to purify a woman’s body before or after intercourse “What does this mean?” passing the dictionary to my friend in fear. “It’s like a tampon,” she replied. “If you use one, you’re automatically deflowered.” “And that’s wrong, right?” Alicia, who wore bang-less black hair and purple leotards and attended an expensive School for the Gifted, stood tall on her toes, the tiny bones crackling, commanding my rapt attention: “If you’re not a virgin and you’re not married, you might as well be a prostitute—or dead.” In sex education class, we are invited to write our anonymous questions on blue note cards and pass them forward for the teacher to answer: What is the Maidenhead? I think it’s a ship, but my sister says it’s a bridge. (I picture it, white sails shaking like the Mayflower: a dozen brightwhite aprons hanging out to dry.)

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“Actually, maidenhead is not a ship or a bridge. It’s another word for hymen. Does anyone know what hymen means?” (I rack my brain, disliking the word, and the name Regina, and Brussel sprouts, which the word also reminds me of.) “The hymen is a fold of tissue that partly covers the vagina of a virgin.” (Giggles all around, and Mrs. Miller chiding.) My question, written in careful cursive: Why does sex change people so completely? “Hmm,” she murmurs, “I’m not sure how to respond to this one.” Shaking her head: “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.” Are nuns Mrs.—since they’re married to God—or Miss—since they don’t get it on? Will you really go to hell if you fornicate? Can men be virgins too, or is there a different name? (Giggles all around, and Mrs. Miller chiding.) Alicia again, sitting cross-legged on her canopy bed, feet ceaselessly flexing: “Did you know that vagina means sheath? And what does a sheath cover? A sword! Which means the penis is a sword, and the body is a battlefield, and sex is a kind of war.” Her brown eyes round as buttons; her mouth breathless, gleaming. “I thought that was love,” I reply. “Love and war.” “I’m just saying,” limbs shaking from too much sugar, too many ideas. “But sheaths protect swords. A sword rests in a sheath when it isn’t slaying dragons and other things of that nature.” (My new favourite phrase.) “You make it sound like men and women are

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doing battle with each other.” “They are, Dummy. That’s why it’s called the battle of the sexes.” “Why what is?” “I’m just saying”—triumph in her tone—”I’m just saying.” For all we know, Rapunzel may have been a nun, and the castle tower just as easily a cloister. She may have renounced all her worldly possessions, promised to live an obedient life, and solemnly sworn (on penalty of death) never to sheath a lover’s sword. This one, celibacy’s vow: virginity raised to a higher power. She may, however, have maintained one secret vanity, which over the years grew increasingly difficult to conceal. Having once seen Crystal Gale perform “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” at a country music festival outside Paducah, KY, young Pun determined to grow her hay-coloured hair equally long and lavish, providing a curtain of warmth in the winter and, when tightly braided, a most efficient broom. One day as Rapunzel dutifully swept her spartan cell, she was lured close to the window by a mischievous minstrel crooning a familiar song. Glimpsing her sturdy rope of hair, the minstrel called out, “Sister, why is your head not shaved like the others of your order?” Shamed by her sudden exposure, Rapunzel instructed the man to ascend via the rose trellis that adorned the cloister’s walls, believing she might seduce him into silence. When he found this apparatus incomparably wobbly, she consented at last to lower her hair, which the man climbed eagerly, fitting his feet between each stair-like crevice of her braid. Upon reaching the ledge, however, the minstrel removed his cloak, revealing a priest’s collar cinched tightly at his throat. Her breath choked in: quick gasps, hasty swallows. With one lithe stroke of a swiftly wielded knife, the priest severed Rapunzel’s hair, which plummeted to the earth, unbinding in flight and scattering as sheaves of wheat among the birds assembled below. At the same moment, the bedside mirror cracked. Rapunzel reached for a shard of glass, wherein her brown eyes blazed suddenly, unabashedly, blue. Somewhere in the soft Sandusky dusk: Ferris wheel kisses, Kewpie dolls purchased with darts

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A tunnel of something resembling love Or a funhouse mirror that mocks it Past-Knowing Time: the curfews of Kalamazoo and a triangle (something resembling love) played out in voice box and speakers at the fast-food drive-thru Even Anchorage, under siege of unrelenting solstice sun: what curtains cannot curtail what windows cannot wind down Bear witness to the wilderness in each of us— the howl of something human: that hunger sometimes resembling love How to resist the myths of Honolulu, Seduction’s same old story set to a Tropical Paradise tract: Hanauma Bay

Waikiki,

Not better here, not certain—simply “charmed” The sun sets in these nether-regions also, sinking below horizon-line of happily ever after sand dollars split open spilling their white doves like those that clutter dingy Oahu streets (dove, recall, is a kinder word for pigeon)

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Stand in the Punchbowl. Gaze out over the massive sea. Remember Pearl Harbor. Love and War. Green geckos on white stucco walls. Limbs severed. Bodies splitting like hairs. The technicalities of Love. Of War. Recall how once upon a time you stood there, sixteen, hollow as a seashell, ocean of longing rushing through. Think of the astronauts, their white space suits, their copious quantities of Tang. Above it all—moon adorning the hood of their grand interstellar automobile, whirr of nothing but space all around. Imagine love being made without gravity. The unbinding, the scattering, the sheaves . . .

‘ Heather and Sara were, plainly put, different from other girls.

High school: all pleated plaid and aching recidivism.

“Did I see you, smoking after class? Did I see you, one torch passed between your angsty mouths?” What I really said (less nimble, less quick): “What makes you the way that you are?” Sara shrugs. I’m a pagan. Fuck these Puritans. Nuns don’t like men either. “Can a lesbian still be a virgin?” Sara chews her pen cap, tucks her hair. Depends. Has this hypothetical lesbian ever fucked a hypothetical girl?

“But how could she? Depends. How do you define sex? How do you qualify fucking?

“I don’t. I mean—I’m just curious.” Don’t be curious. (Light eyes shimmering, moist without tears.) Be wise.

From my textbook 1: The vocation to chastity—the successful

1. Sex and the Teenager: Choices and Decisions by Kieran Sawyer; Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1990. 108


integration of sexuality within a person—is a common one to all people, no matter their state in life. From my friend, “the feminist”: Abstinence is tricky. From Merriam-Webster: Abstention from unlawful sexual intercourse, or from all sexual intercourse; purity of conduct or intention; personal integrity. Me: “I’m saving myself.” Her: “From what?” Me: “Not from—for.” Her: “Why?” Me: “Because . . . I have a lot of integrity (?)” Her: “Try again.” Me: “Because . . . it’s morally right (?)” Her: “Gimme a break.” Me: “Because . . . I’m scared.” Her: “Now we’re getting somewhere.” There was once a titian-haired woman—fresh and foolhardy—mad with love for a certain man. They married young, conceived at once, and settled into a comfortable, uncomplicated life. Until the woman awoke at thirty, splintered as a sand dollar, unsure who to blame, exile flashing urgent as a flare. Lacking explanation or excuse, she packed her bags, bundled her child, and proceeded into the world alone: terrified to leave, more terrified not to. In the interim, she divorced, remarried, and divorced again, returning in the end to the same man she had loved since her seventeenth birthday. “Are you finished now?” he asked. “Not finished—ready,” she said. You have likely heard of crossing the bridge, bridging the gap, burning the bridge, and water flowing beneath it: bygones, be gone! You may wonder in retrospect if all these examples refer to the same bridge, and whether you would jump from it if the one you love most in the world asked you to. You may consider yourself by this time quite

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an expert in bridges, whether drawbridges flexing for passing ships, or rope bridges frayed at their seams and shaking. You may think Golden Gate or Brooklyn or crest of your nose or rise of your mouth or a card game you’ve never played before.

This

That

The Other

All of the Above

(circle one)

You may also remember the troll living under the bridge, that same bridge, site of your most flagrant hesitations. Maybe this troll is a gruff city maintenance worker who carries his lunch in a sturdy black box and drinks coffee from a rusted canteen. Or maybe he’s a nomad camped in a furrowed tent, or a vagrant hopeful for change. Maybe he is a she. Maybe the troll is a figment of your imagination, fickle and prone to complain. Traditionally, this story is told from the perspective of three Billy goats who trick the troll into letting them pass. A psychologist may ask: “What was their motivation for crossing the bridge? Was their behavior reinforced or thwarted?” A businessman may ask: “What were the bargaining strategies they used? How did the goats profit from their passage?” A poet, however, may be prompted to consider the troll more closely—why was he there? what threat did he pose? Maybe he is a she. The possibilities become metaphorical at this stage. What if you are all three of the Billy goats—the psychologist would be pressed to classify them, Id, Ego, Superego, but we will refrain—and what if you are also the troll? Is it startling to consider yourself the protagonist and the antagonist of your own story? The businessman might call this a monopoly (on pleasure, on worry, on pain). But you are also the bridge-builder—the one crossing above, the one guarding below—and the shadows their bodies cast, and the grassy knoll the goats are headed toward, and the water (an ocean of longing perhaps?) that rushes, endlessly, under the bridge you have made. A fortune cookie may thus conclude: Look before you leap, but close your eyes, falling.

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Somewhere in a Courtyard Marriott Jacuzzi suite (replete with complimentary fruit basket and untouched Champagne), the legend of the First Time begins to break down Elsewhere: a Weston or a Hilton or a Radisson This is the story I was groomed for: One man, one woman, a diamond plus two gold bands, 3-4 years of waiting Meals of mashed potatoes, in-laws-to-be, the gravy of close scrutiny and small conversation Purity of conduct and intention Rebuttals (unspoken, unheard): White is not my best colour. I hate waiting. I did not want to be an “anything but” girl. I wanted to be an “everything and.” But this is the way that God intended, and we’ll be blessed for following His commands . . . I want it to be special, to be sacred . . . It’s safer this way—no risk, no room for regret . . . Sometimes still I yearn to believe the story of the Holy Sacrament of Marriage. I want to drive to Boston now, in a fervor, or head north with passports in hand to Toronto: the warm evening saying Step, anywhere you go is yours.2 Would it be redundant now, after all the years of—what would you call this love—improvisation? I read what the Poet says, and I believe her: to bloom is to be taken completely.

2. Several fragments in this section are borrowed gratefully from Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts by Jorie Graham, Princeton University Press, 1980. 111


There is no man here, no heart-shaped tub in the Poconos, no cufflinks in the bureau drawer. The woman in this story, who could have been me—who I could have been—finds rose petals on her pillow most pleasing, and the large bouquet in the foyer, the handfuls of crisp money and the tables of shiny packages, the praise—all of it, most pleasing. And she loves him of course, and this is what they have been waiting for, and now the whole world of their knowing blesses them, and the hotel manager shakes his hand and smiles on her with a face warmed by full approval. Why then does she tremble at the unexpected weight of the second ring? Alone now, temptation diffused by endorsement, by two signatures with a wobbly pen and the State of Wherever pronouncing them . . . She never imagined this part of the story: dénouement: disappointment, fatigue. Her shining moment on the red carpet with the white satin dress and the dark muslin sash has passed. Fraulein Maria returns from the honeymoon altered. Where is her feisty spirit now, her knack for mischief and spontaneity? She no longer rides bicycles, juggles apples in the market square—tips boats over. Is it contentment, complacency? Why the veiled look in her eyes, the glowing acquiescence? He stands at the sink, having done what he was supposed to do, having become a man of patience, of personal integrity. And this is his reward. He doesn’t want to think of her as a prize, but how not to covet what is consistently denied? White petals, creaseless, ambitious. He feels the undertow of all her expectations, the hard grip of the hotel manager’s hand, the new weight of his unchanged name. The words rain down on him now: etiquette, entitlement: may I break your even weave, loosen your knot? Questions of ownership, enlightenment: what does she want from me? what may I take from her? The axis of rupture around which this hour revolves: if I break you, are you mine?

‘ It will be like the Little Mermaid, but not the Disney version.

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In the “real” story, which I read as a child, she falls in love with a prince, trading her voice for a pair of legs. But the legs do not simply appear. They must grow painfully, replacing her fish-tail, leaving her vulnerable there in the inter-tide where she may drown. Spooning, the first time: our bodies, long and sharp as knives Swimming, which she has known all her life by another name, becomes suddenly difficult, foreign. Unbuttoning my sweater in the stuffy dorm: Why won’t you touch them? You’re a man. You’re supposed to want to touch them. Nothing works out according to plan. Her desire is not returned; her passions are not reciprocated. “What do you want?” Thinking a long time: “Does it matter?” The failed seduction carries a penalty. She cannot remain human, and she cannot return to the sea. Not as she was. Water now, flooding the bridge . . . Playing chess again, with the one I most wanted to love: “Is this it, then? No more movement. Every piece has already been played.” He said it, with a grand gesture and a sigh— Stalemate—and gingerly kissed my eyes. The no-longer mermaid, no-longer maiden will dissolve from her hybrid state. She will be transformed into the deadly cold sea-foam of the Arctic Sea. I wondered.

What will become of me?

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my mother

Not a virgin like my aunt,

or a mother like

Spinster: archaic term for a professional thread spinner and by extension for a woman who never marries or raises children because she can support herself with her work, thereby having no need to marry. Miss

Mrs. Ms. Mr.

(circle one) Think of the hay, the straw, the flax, the gold. Think of dallying, tumbling—the needle of light spearing the hay-loft window. Think of cornfields and cornflowers: all those husked bodies, those seeded fields. Think of Big Bone Lick State Park (because the landscape has humour) and Barren River (because it has sorrow also). Think of the ancient green hills, many-siloed. Think of the mad couplings, and the cover of darkness, and the prayers that congregate (unspoken, unheard) in the deep basin of the wishing well. Think of lust, abstention, power. Think of our finest approximations, that something resembling love . . . The Renunciation What if the Woman did not consent, regardless of betrothal or virginity, regardless of the Angel’s divine demand? What if Mary Ann, alone in the family farmhouse on the outskirts of Iowa City, sat drinking an RC Cola and stitching her mother’s shift? There were socks to darn also, and blankets to mend, and in the background, a crackling television set: canned game show laughter and toothpaste commercial jingles. “I have a steady boyfriend,” she said. “I have two years left of high school, and after that, who knows?” “I’m thinking about Rhode Island School of Design.” “I’ve never even seen the Ocean.” And finally, growing weary of the charade: “Listen, I don’t want kids.” The Angel persisted, but the Girl was firm. She stood up, her thin frame drowning in the

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button-down dress, her bare feet with toenails gleaming. “I’m really flattered, but I’d rather not. Here,” gesturing to the tattered screen door, the sprawling front porch—“let me show you out.” Gabriel might as well have been a traveling salesman, sleek car brimming with encyclopedias or household cleaners. He might as well have worn a suit with dark tie slightly askew and shoes polished so bright she could see her face in them when she looked down. Mary Ann knew where the shotgun was, but she didn’t think she’d need it. She slipped on an apron, pockets full of pegs, and walked around back to the clothesline. There was laundry to take in, and more to be washed, and later that night she had plans to watch WKRP in Cincinnati . . . The Rorschach “If I say body—” “Husk.” “If I say spirit—” “Light.” “If I say light—” “Mirror.” “Mirror—” “Fog.” “What about crux?” “Possible.” “What about climax?” “Over.” “Purity—” “Futile.” “Futility—” “Pure.” “Now you’re playing with me.” “Maybe.” “Body—” “Soft.” “Hay—” “Sex.” “Sex—”

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“Multi-valent.” “Come again?” “Exactly.” “Why?” “X.” “As in former?” “As in female.” “Bridge—” “Passage.” “Safe—” “Reluctant.” “Save—” “Hoard.” “Hoard—” “Lonely.” “Light—” “Winnow.” “Kiss—” “Linger.” “Fallow—” “Earth.” “God—” “Fog.” “Chaste—” “Antiquate.” “Religion—” “Apostasy.” “Iron—” “Maiden.” “Maiden—” “Red.” “Music—” “Ocean.” “Body—” “Story.” “Virgin—” “Seashell.” “Story—”

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“Golden.” “Truth—” “Tenuous.” “Safe—” “Red.”

‘

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Editor’s Note

Dear Readers,



“At an early age, children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to enjoy fairy tales,” Andre Breton wrote in 1924. “There are fairy tales to be written for adults,” he continued. “Fairy tales almost blue.” Violet flowers are often described as “almost-blue,” which is how I chose this color; or almost how. For a long time I was foolishly excited about writing this Editor’s Note, full of happiness about The Violet Issue, the third issue of Fairy Tale Review, with its diverse contents and new voices and magical language. This is the first issue that is very happily a copublication with the University of Alabama Press. So much of this issue came as a surprise, as a gift. But then one of my oldest friends, one of our finest poets, and one of the most ardent supporters of Fairy Tale Review, left us forever. Sarah Hannah took her own life in May, a week before her 41st birthday. This issue is dedicated to her. Sarah was the first person to know that this issue would be violet. She and I had a long conversation about it last November. I thought the issue would be pink, I told her. Pink is the color that she and I shared a mutual obsession with, and our friendship of the past 26 years revolved very much around pink. The pink flowers we planted, the sequined pink curtains we both had on our windows (first on hers in Cambridge, then sent to mine in Tuscaloosa), the mini pink skirts we wore to Go-Go’s concerts, the pink candles we burned. We wrote letters on pink paper and often printed our first drafts on pink paper too. But Sarah said not to do this issue as The Pink Issue. “Save pink for last, for when we are old,” she said with that tone of glee—a wicked glee, an excitement only she could conjure for the smallest detail, making everything wild and secret and real. 118


So I decided upon violet while reading Breton, and wrote to tell her. “Perfect!” Sarah wrote back, and attached to the note the poems that appear here. She added that she used violet in one of the poems intending for readers to see it mistakenly as violent instead. And so we do. It is fitting that Sarah’s poem contains the one of the rare instances of the word violet in contributions to The Violet Issue. She was a rare flower. And, as with the Andrew Lang series, the colors do not correspond exactly to the contents—I edit along the precise path of a dream without trying to wake it. But now I want to wake up, of course, from the nightmare. For while there is not much violet in here, there is a lot of violence in here, as in the tales, as in the world. Sarah’s departure could be described in her own words as “unthinking, true.” Violet, violent, a fairy tale almost blue . . . Thank you for reading. And to all contributors, thank you for your beautiful and very fine work.

Kate Bernheimer Tuscaloosa AL

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Contributor Notes

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KIM ADDONIZIO is the author of four poetry collections, most recently What Is This Thing Called Love (W.W. Norton). She recently published a second novel, My Dreams Out in the Street, from Simon & Schuster. www.kimaddonizio.com. For me, fairy tales meet some need for magic and transformation, a way to access the world beyond/behind/within the literal one. I like starting with something given—a stock character like a witch or princess or djinn, a magical object or situation—that I can then take off from. I remember my mother reading me fairy tales when I was little, and telling me I would outgrow them. ‘No. I never will,’ I said. Happily, I never did. DON MEE CHOI lives in Seattle and translates Kim Hyesoon. Her original poems have appeared in Action, Yes, Cipher, La Petite Zine, and Tinfish. I learned how to read in English by reading fairy tales. I was an obstinate child, so I thought it was unfair that I had to learn English when no one around me in Hong Kong cared to learn Korean. The fairy tales ended up being the only stories I consented to read in English for a while because they reminded me of some of the folk and fantastical tales I have heard growing up as a small child in South Korea. LUCY CORIN’s novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls was published by FC2 in 2004. Her short story collection The Entire Predicament was published in October 2007 by Tin House Books. She teaches at the University of CA, Davis. Right now I’m interested in fairy tales in the way I heard on radio the director of Pan (whose name I forget and which I haven’t seen) talking about fairy tales— something about the way people turn to them in response or relation to atrocity. I am interested in them as a way to approach what seems

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unapproachable in contemporary politics and culture (you know what I’m talking bout) as well as what is atrocious and unapproachable in personal history. It’s a way to take the pretense out, to be serious without being a &*(ˆ$ snob. Fun and magic and stark structure make certain kinds of thinking possible because you can stand yourself long enough to actually get somewhere. TR ACY DAUGHERTY is the author of four novels, a book of essays, and three short story collections, the latest of which is Late in the Standoff. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in Oregon with his wife, the writer Marjorie Sandor. Certain architectural theories may help us understand the relationship of fairy tales to ‘reality.’ Some historians believe that the prototype for Europe’s grand Gothic cathedrals was a modest wooden construction in a sacred groove of trees: the stately columns made of tree limbs and the arches formed by bending willow limbs and tying them together with rope. The trees’ leafsprouts, in the spring, created the original ornamentation we see echoed in stone, now, in places like Chartres. Sacrifices were performed in sacred groves: rituals in which murder is dressed up to be a gift to the gods. The shapes of sacrifice are encased in the curves of white marble in the great cathedrals. Similarly, all contemporary stories contain (like breath inside a bottle) the echoes of fairy tales—archetypes, mythic and ritual structures, that echo our past, our innermost beings, and our attempts to appease what lies beyond us. ESPIDO FREIRE was born in Bilbao, Spain, in 1974. She received a Bachelor’s degree in English philology and a Master’s degree in Editing from the University of Deusto. She is the author of several novels, including Donde siempre es octubre (1999), Melocotones helados (winner of the Planeta Prize 1999), and Nos espera la noche (2003), as well as the story collection Juegos míos (2004). Her novels have been translated into several languages, including French, German, and Portuguese.

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J. J. GR ANDVILLE (Jean Igance Julien Gerard 1803-1847), illustrator of Les Fléurs Animees (The Flowers Personified) also illustrated La Fontaine’s Fables (1838), Swift’s Voyages de Gulliver (1838), Defoe’s Aventures de Robinson Crusoe (1840) and Chevalier’s Don Quichotte de la manche (1848). His most celebrated works are probably Scenes de la vie privee et publique des animaux (1842) and Petites miseres de la vie humaine (1843). He is famous for depicting human beings as animals. The publication of Un autre monde (1844) bewildered and alienated part of his large public. He is said to have been an influence on Dore, Hugo, Kafka, Tenniel (Alice in Wonderland), and Walt Disney. SAR AH HANNAH is the author of two collections, both published by Tupelo Press, Longing Distance and Inflorescence. She grew up in a stone house, which has since burned to the ground, on Quinobequin Road in Waban, Massachusetts. Sarah Hannah received a B.A. from Wesleyan University, and an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from many journals, including The Southern Review, Parnassus, Agni, Western Humanities Review, New Millennium Writing, The National Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Harvard Review, Poetry London, and Fulcrum. She was an editor at Barrow Street Press, Poet Laureate of The Friends of Hemlock Gorge, an organization of nature conservators in Newton, MA, and a devoted friend, teacher, sister, and daughter. Until her death in May 2007, she taught poetry at Emerson College in Boston. The poems in this issue appear in Inflorescence, courtesy of Sarah Hannah and Tupelo Press. LILY HOANG’s novel, Parabola, recently won the Chaismus Press First Book Contest. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Quarter After Eight, Mad Hatters’ Review, and BlazeVOX. She received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame in 2006. Her novella, Changing, is forthcoming from Fairy Tale Review Press in 2008. I like to think of these hexagrams as a re/un/over/under-telling/ vision/translation of the I Ching, or Book of Changes. I’ve always been interested in the mythology involved in both fortune telling and fairy tales, and I attempt to weave these together with a

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modern coming-of-age story. Ultimately, I think fortune telling, fairy tales, and growing up are interchangeable. ANNA MARIA HONG is a two-time National Poetry Series finalist and Pushcart Prize nominee. She has published poems in many journals including Fence, Black Clock, Puerto del Sol, Cue, Hotel Amerika, and Crab Orchard Review. Her writings about literature and visual art appear in publications such as American Book Review, The Stranger, Poets & Writers, poetryfoundation.org, ARCADE, and The International Examiner. She has also produced numerous crossgenre events and performed and lectured at venues including the Microsoft Art Gallery, the Experience Music Project, and Bumbershoot. She teaches creative writing at UCLA’s Writers Program. KIM HYESOON is a prominent South Korean poet. She has received numerous prestigious literary awards. She teaches creative writing at Seoul Institute of the Arts. Translations of her poetry are available in When the Plug Gets Unplugged (Tinfish Press, 2005) and Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women (Zephyr Press, 2006). Her selected poems in translation are forthcoming from Action Books, 2008. TOSHIYA KAMEI is the translator of The Curse of Eve and Other Stories by Liliana Blum (Host Publications, forthcoming), and a graduate student at the University of Arkansas. Kamei’s translations have recently appeared in The Listening Eye, Common Ground Review, and Visions International. I believe the first seeds of Espido Freire’s novels took root during her childhood, as she grew up listening to her Galician grandmother’s stories. Thus, her novels have a timeless feel to them, even when they are set in modern times. JEFFREY LEVINE is the author of Rumor of Cortez (Red Hen, 2005), nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry, and Mortal, Everlasting, winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Prize from Pavement Saw Press (2002). He is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Tupelo Press, an independent literary press. 123


LISA OLSTEIN is the author of Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, winner of the 2005 Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Centrum Foundation. I love the journey and journeying aspects of fairy tales, the way they move us through landscapes and scenarios but also inward, towards our fears and questions, our drives and desires. So often en route the rules (of conduct, social contract, reality) bend—as becomes places of heightened contrast and the kind of magic realism that shadow normative experience—and amidst that bending, everything (and everyone) becomes more and more itself. DAVID PETRUZELLI’s first book of poems, Everyone Coming Toward You (2005) won the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize. He lives in New York City and is a member of the expert committee of The Philatelic Foundation, a mysterious organization which overlooks Bryant Park and passes judgment on rare stamps and postal history. What I always found in the fairy tales of my childhood is what I want in my own poems: story-telling, accessibility, transformations, a voice that speaks to the secret grown-up in the child. NATANIA ROSENFELD is Associate Professor of English at Knox College and the author of a critical book, Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, published by Princeton University Press in 2000. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, RHINO, Seneca Review, Exquisite Corpse, Cimarron Review, and The Antioch Review. In 2007 she received an Illinois Arts Council literary award for her poem “Bodies,” published in Another Chicago Magazine. Her personal essays have been published in Hotel Amerika, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, Lake Effect, and Post Road. When I was a child, we lived in Germany for a year and a half. On our return to America, my parents bought me LP’s of recorded German fairy tales to help me retain the language. I listened to beautifully acted and produced versions of the most

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famous stories of Grimm and others, which were brought fully alive by the voices and sound effects of the recordings. Many years later, I realized that the best way to write about my own psychological landscape, as well as people in my life I’d rather not present realistically, was to transmute them into fairy tales. Whether there is a relation between this realization and those LP’s, I don’t know, but I remember the latter fondly. AURELIE SHEEHAN is the author of two novels, The Anxiety of Everyday Objects and History Lesson for Girls, as well as the short story collection Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant. She teaches and directs the creative writing program at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I feel fairy tales inside me like a hidden, secret language, an undeniable, absolutely physical part of who I am. They are neither religion nor myth, because they illustrate but do not soothe, do not pacify. Instead they provide a kind of reassuring disquiet, a sense that the world really isn’t what you see with your eyes. RICHARD SIKEN’s poetry collection Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, a Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, Indiana Review, and Forklift, Ohio, as well as in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2000 and Legitimate Dangers. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. KIER AN SUCKLING is a philosopher and Policy Director of the Center for Biological Diversity, which has offices in Tucson, Arizona, Bozeman, Montana, Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California. He lives with his wife and daughter in Arizona. LEE UPTON’s fifth book of poems, Undid in the Land of Undone, is forthcoming from New Issues Press in Fall 2007. Her most recent book of literary criticism, Defensive Measures, was published by

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Bucknell University Press. Her poetry and fiction appear widely. If as children we stroked the velvety pelt of the fairy tale, we are wilder for it now and are given to mischief. We have some secret that all the sense in the world can’t dissolve. Whenever we wish, we can wrap ourselves in the fur of the tale—or we may find that we’ve swallowed the wolf ourselves. If we’re writers, we may upend the fairy tale’s plot relentlessly, whether we’re the charmed innocent, or the cynical wolf, or the querulous pig. We keep building our houses of paper and hoping they’ll never be blown down. JULIE MARIE WADE was born in Seattle in 1979. She has received the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize, and the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Spoon River Review, Cimarron Review, Red Rock Review, Notre Dame Review, Another Chicago Magazine, King’s English: Journal of Long Prose, Nimrod, Dogwood, Phoebe, and Off the Rocks: A Journal of Queer Memoir, among others. She lives with her partner and their two cats in rural Ohio and teaches literature and creative writing at an independent boarding school. In January of 1999 when I was a sophomore in college, I registered for a J-term seminar called ‘Fairy Tales and Fantasy.’ The course was taught by an intensely brilliant and passionate professor named David Seal, who emphasized the importance of reading our own lives for their mythological elements. We met for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, for a solid month, and during that time, we read Angela Carter and Joseph Campbell and James Hillman and the Bible and many assorted collections of fairy tales and fables as well as subversive retellings of familiar stories. In this class, I fell in love with the concept of ‘katabasis,’ meaning a descent or journey downward--into the cellar or into the self, or more specifically, into the underworld. And armed with the power of this word, I began to shape my own emerging poetry and prose as an ongoing chronicle of what I found, there below the surface of things.

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Acknowledgments



With thanks to Dean Olin and the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Alabama for their generous support of Fairy Tale Review at the Gold Level of sponsorship. Please see our website for specific details about sponsorship opportunities. Additional assistance has also been provided by the Department of English and the Program in Creative Writing. Gratitude also to the W. & R. Bernheimer Charitable Trust and to the staff at the University of Alabama Press. Interior art, “Violet, Violette, Viola,” from Flowers Personified; Being a Translation of Grandville’s “LES FLEURS ANIMÉES” by N. Cleaveland, Esq., Illustrated with Steel Engravings, Beautifully Colored. NEW YORK; Published by R. Martin, 170 Broadway 1847. Image Courtesy of www.earthlypursuits.com

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Announcement



Fairy Tale Review is pleased to announce a new book imprint, Fairy Tale Review Press. Please check the Fairy Tale Review website for ordering information and news. Fairy Tale Review Press will be distributed by Small Press Distribution.

2008 Titles: Joy Williams The Changeling

ISBN 978-0-9799954-0-8 $16 , 200 pp. This 3oth Anniversary Edition of The Changeling by Joy Williams will include a Foreword by Rick Moody. An overlooked and spectacular novel, The Changeling is a visionary fairy tale, a work of mythic genius. Terrifying, poetic, revelations follow The Changeling’s abandoned heroine Pearl everywhere she goes, whether by air, land, or sea. Joy Williams has won the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, among other prizes. Her first novel, State of Grace, was a National Book Award Finalist. “An inverse odyssey of a 20th-century feminine sensibility—our simpleton heroine ends a depraved alcoholic—the witty and horrifying Changeling establishes Williams as a major contemporary novelist.” (Virginia Quarterly Review, 1978). The 3oth Anniversary Edition seeks to reintroduce this novel to contemporary readers as one of the most original and alarming fairy-tale books ever written.

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Jöhannes Goransson Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”) ISBN 978-0-9799954-1-5 $12, 165 pp.

Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”) is television shot through Artaud’s Momo-body. It is the fairy tale of Deleuze’s Body without Organs. Hugo Ball restaged in Los Angeles. And, without end, Pilot is an assemblage, a book of nursery rhymes gone wrong in translation. Its strange characters, abandoned from other texts, include Lilja, the Pearls of Stockholm and assorted imperiled girls. Here, in Johannes Göransson’s glittering exocity, they find a new and beautifully stitched home. Göransson was born and raised in Skåne, Sweden, but has lived in the US for many years. He is co-editor of Action Books and has translated the work of Aase Berg, Henry Parland, Ann Jäderlund and other Swedish and Finland Swedish poets.

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< The End >


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