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Article Title

The Charcoal Issue

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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

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