Article Title
The Charcoal Issue
Abstract
ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS
JOEL HANS
Editor’s Note • 17
By the time charcoal arrives in the incarnation we know best, it has already lived two distinct lives. The first life is in the shape of the living—mostly in the form of a tree, although it can be any plant, really, or even an animal. The second life is in the living thing’s annihilation.
RUTH BAUMANN
Incantation: Female • 19
They say to fall into the river.
They say not to let it carry: no bodies,
no bodies, not me.
FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK
Sweet Meats • 21
My brother walked in first and then I followed him.
I always followed him.
KRISTEN BRIDA
Eurydice tells us her favorite memory with Orpheus • 25
Once I told him a heart’s purpose was to make heart noises & he said he
wanted to stick a match in my mouth. It was late & we were both tired &
sometimes when we heard each other speak, it was like the sky went
white & flat.
JUSTINE CHAMPINE
The Children • 26
We do not know where the children came from. Some say they emerged
from the woods behind the elementary school. Others claim an unfamiliar
white bus with dark windows unloaded them, sped off.
MOLLIE CHANDLER
Ekphrasis for Snow White in Her Glass Coffin • 30
I. This one looks at her and thinks
in death she’s even warmer.
Her cheeks bear the blue of flame.
JOS CHARLES
Yield • 33
An Excerpt from a Memoir
One is not born a woman, yes yes, one becomes a woman, but when I was seven I
went to summer camp, despite being highly agoraphobic, as I was convinced
by my third grade teacher that Jesus would meet us there and
enter my heart
CAROLINE CREW
The Discomfort Index • 40
An Essay
There is no personal space in Vegas. It’s like they got to the desert
boundary of their Mojave oasis and realized they had to turn back, fold
in on themselves, maximize the limited resources and cram.
EMRYS DONALDSON
The Albatrosses • 47
We warned the boys about the cliff, the one out there in the island cove.
It loomed over the beach, with scraggly trees and grass alive in its crevices.
ASHLEIGH E. GILL
The Woman Who Ate Foxes • 49
The woman who ate foxes believed they could heal her. She liked the
gamey strings of tough meat stuck between her teeth, the matted lumps
of rusty fur scattered under the table. She ate them raw.
RAQUEL VASQUEZ GILLILAND
“How Lines Came to Be Drawn on Human Hands”
& “Exiles of the Wild Moon” • 52
When humans first emerged from a cave in the earth, our hands
were smooth as the skin of milk. It was said that each hand could
speak. Not in the way you and I speak today, but an ancient sort of
language, one that used the voice of twig, grass, stone, star.
JENNIFER GIVHAN
When I Am Not Joan of Arc Or You Bring Me a Bowl
of Green & Purple Olives • 54
I am made for our own goddamn kitchen
I’ve wrecked us &
cannot light the stove pilot out
& clicking box of casino matches
my hands juddering Sometimes you carry
watermelon not gently
MARY HAIDRI
Village of the Red Mothers • 56
The Charcoal Issue Poetry Award Winner
as judged by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
The night you were born, a village grew up from the frozen ground in Siberia.
In the beginning, the house walls were cartilaginous and uncertain.
As you grew older they hardened into bone.
BRITTANY HAILER
Oprahification • 60
Another man left me the day after I turned 26
and Oprah turned 62.
After the balloons popped. After he and I took shot for shot.
After he produced a blue rubber dildo.
DAVID HANSEN
Hell • 62
In Hell, a boy, kindly and congenial, comes down a crimson dune at sunset
to bring you cola in a bottle and a glass of crushed ice on a wicker tray.
SATOSHI IWAI
“Summer Faces” & “Mercury Night” • 73
Sunflowers never salute historians, because every summer the flowers
are busy waiting for black deaths to appear on their yellow faces. They
never look down at the cracked ground, even while the light shadows of
the historians crawl away to the nameless town.
DEVI LASKAR
The View from the ————— Bus / • 75
I am — woman —— disappeared before
reciting the last ———————— eulogy.
————— even — able to grant —
that much, after all ————.
BALDOMERO LILLO
El Alma de la Máquina • 77
La silueta del maquinista con su traje de dril azul se destaca desde el
amanecer hasta la noche en lo alto de la plataforma de la máquina. Su
turno es de doce horas consecutivas.
BALDOMERO LILLO
Translated by Jonathan Wlodarski
The Soul of the Machine • 80
The silhouette of the machinist in his denim suit, sitting atop the machine’s
platform, stands out from dawn to dusk. His shift is twelve consecutive
hours.
JACOB LINDBERG
Ol’ Captain Kurt • 83
Kurt thinks back to his father’s stories of mermen
who swam too far upstream, rejected the cold,
cocooned in sailor bones, and, in the third winter rose:
whiskered and sturgeon.
AMELIA MARTENS
“Still in the 21st Century” & “Disaster Doesn’t Have to Be Spectacular” • 85
The little girl and the bear use an adding machine to ring up the dead.
They press their cheeks to the equals sign. Hello? Hello? No one is there.
Nothing is equal.
ERIN MULLIKIN
Provençal • 87
It used to be that we cousins would play a game.
We’d pretend that the L-shaped steps of our grandmother’s house
were a grocery store check-out. The moss hung sad and reckless.
ISHELLE PAYER
Something’s Up with Alice • 88
Have you heard about Alice? Disappearing Alice, who is both magician
and rabbit? Just like Timmy, always falling down wells, leaving Lassie
to bark for help. And we search high and low. We shine our flashlights
along the Delta bank, half-expecting to find her facedown on the rocks.
PAISLEY REKDAL
Psyche • 100
The photos of the boy were taken
first in play, but when one
emerged in the darkroom’s
bath of her son’s back stained
SARA RYAN
“I Will Have Forgotten You by Sunday” & “Bad Hunter” • 103
UFC fighting plays on the TV in the bar—
men, with ground up teeth, smile through
blood and do backflips from fences.
ERIC SCHLICH
Unpresidented! • 105
The Charcoal Issue Prose Award Winner as judged by Helen Oyeyemi
This week on Unpresidented!…
The Presidential Contestants move into the White House and face their
first Presidential Task: Moving into the White House! Looks like the
light packers will have an advantage. First Contestant to unload their
moving truck wins National Security!
RION AMILCAR SCOTT
The Problem of Heat Loss • 122
And so that year there was the summer and then there was the winter,
no autumn between the two. One Sunday we found Old Darrion had
died alone in the afternoon from heat stroke on the reddest of the Code
Red days, his body baking in his attic.
THERESA SULLIVAN
The Women • 124
We departed
which is to say we left
the house, jogged
down the pavement,
pedaled a bicycle
by a cornfield
BRITTANY TOMASELLI
“It’s your fault I’ve got to make the rounds through the forest several times a week.” • 126
I’m talking about ash that has the
shape of an apple.
MADELEINE WATTENBERG
Pantoum for When the Skies Clear and We’ll Know • 127
we’ve poisoned even the vultures.
My plate is clean
just like you taught; white china on red cloth.
I’ve returned the dishes to the cabinet. My plate is clean
as freed bone.
CORI WINROCK
A Real Spacesuit Is a Little Envelope of Earth Conditions • 129
When our mothers were astronauts, we sewed space
-suits from donated wedding dresses
so we could buy better thread. We sewed day into night
C PAM ZHANG
Shelter • 137
We raised bone to scaffold our mothers’ houses. Joints lashed fast with
sinew, pale ribs curved to beams like long strange teeth. We made a game
of construction, bared our tiny canines and giggled.
JACK ZIPES
“The True Story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice” & “The President and His Bodyguards” • 139
Once upon a time, as far back as I can remember, there was a wayward
boy named Henry whose parents were very poor. The father was a jobless
mechanic, and his mother did housecleaning for rich families.
Contributor Notes • 147
Recommended Citation
Bernheimer, Kate
(2018)
"The Charcoal Issue,"
Fairy Tale Review: Vol. 14:
Iss.
1, Article 1.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/fairytalereview/vol14/iss1/1