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Article Title

The Pink Issue

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ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

Kate Bernheimer

Editor’s Note • 17

Many people in the world read pink fairy tales, or have pink fairy tales read to them. This includes adults and children alike. Pink fairy tales are read in Japan, Korea, and South Africa. In Greece, Egypt, and Germany. France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Pakistan, Mexico, Syria, Turkey, and even in the United States, people read pink fairy tales.

Zack Anderson

Two Poems • 19

I strung a line from the belltower
to the ziggurat, got snared
in the halogen nets.

Fairy Tale Review Award in Prose Selected by Kathryn Davis

Skye Anicca

The Sleeping Girl • 21

Myra had not yet seen the girl’s face. She’d been shown to the sea-grass hut late last night by a man who vanished into the brackish darkness, as if he’d never been. Myra’s restless night, which marked her first week abroad, had been bounded by the steady cadence of the ocean and the clues to her roommate’s identity: light brown hair captured in a messy ponytail and the top of a pink T-shirt, otherwise covered by a light sheet.

Carson Ash Beker

Root Systems • 38

Transmission: Enter forest; enter Us, one (1) Red Riding Hood.
Transmission: Received.

Fairy Tale Review Award in Poetry Selected by Jane Miller

Caylin Capra-Thomas

At Publix, The Florida Skunk Ape Hunts Dangerous Game • 46

As feared, I have tired of the lima beans
and iced deer liver strung from blood-splashed branches

and now I slink from my sour, secret-keeping den
into the bright, hard box the hairless ones built.

Kylie Cordell

City for the Lost • 48

The children of the Batsula wander the scrapyard,
searching for loose change in between dry rotted
seats and ashtrays in cars stacked three high on
metal frames, towering over the rusted city, where
all the lost things end up—

Kara Dorris

My Texas Hansel & Gretel • 49

Somewhere between the cowboy church & a biker fellowship
on Highway lives a family. We wake to the rev & spit
of Harleys, the sputtering yum of diesel & snakes
in gas tanks. We sleep to hooves & heels & 4 wheels

Carlea Holl-Jensen

Ghost Lights • 50

They stand at the dead end of the street and watch her ex-husband’s truck pull away. The boy raises his hand to wave, but the truck is already rounding the corner onto the main road, disappearing from sight. He’ll be fine, she assures herself. Children are adaptable.

Mary Kaiser

Baba Yaga, Detroit • 69

Cupping a skull in my hands, candlelight
casting a forked beam from its sockets,
(because a skeleton can open any lock),
I have found my way into the clearing.

Violet Kupersmith

Patrimony • 72

Boys weren’t usually sent away to the École until they were at least eight years old. Jean-François was only seven and a half when he went, but large for his age, which was one of the reasons he was permitted to go early. He took after his father, a Khmer originally from the deep sticky reaches of the South, who was tall and broad-shouldered and the rich umber color of a swamp eel.

Catherine Kyle

Natural Beauty • 88

The carriage was magnificent, a sugar egg,
a bauble. So buffed it shone, a moon in nylon
hurtled down the path. A comet parting

Rebecca Macijeski

Two Poems • 89

His sandwich has legs.

Dawn Manning

At the Lost Children’s Memorial Garden • 91

Brother decodes head-
stones, speaks in pencil

Joyelle McSweeney

And I Might Find Her If I’m Looking Like I Can • 93

Up on the table, they find my heart pressure very low.
And I think: just let it stop.
Like the VHS tape that will play no more
but chokes on the chubby visage of the pop singer
perched on the lip of the yacht.

Leslie Adrienne Miller

Thallus • 98

Among trees it’s possible
to make a menace of anything
loved too much.

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

Providence • 100

East Bay Bike Path and the trees rise before us like a dark wave. Beyond them, there is the gazebo and the pale bodies of the vacationers’ drowned children. The girl children we have named Veronica or Madeline. The boy children George or Richard.

Gina Ochsner

Whistle, My Lad, and I Will Come • 108

In the north country the wind howls over mountaintops, scours steep valleys. A broken jumbled land, here raised high as if an invisible hand had pinched and tugged the hills to their jagged, uneven heights, and there between those mountains deep ravines and valleys of such steep pitch and constriction, horse and cart can hardly pass.

Hilary Plum

Quick flesh • 120

She moves from farm to town bringing
only daughters. The call of dough thrown
to hot stone. In the butcher’s shop she loses
only two fingers, while the vacant
farmhouse on whose porch I was never
pictured vanished.

Peter Shippy

Kaputnik: 4 • 121

She was sitting on my bed grinding birds into powder.

Amber Sparks

A Place for Hiding Precious Things • 123

Her mother, in the way of most fairy-tale mothers: dead.
Her father, in the way of most fairy-tale fathers: dreadfully flawed.
The girl herself: naïve; or, charmingly innocent, if you prefer. The girl herself, in the way of most humans: unready for unhappiness.

Sam Stokley

Can you put me in a peach, David? • 133

Could I be the queen coated in stone juices—
Babcock, Frost, Florida Prince, Georgia’s
finest.

Kailey Tedesco

Two Poems • 134

do not unbutton my silk lace; i am

Natalie Wang

Apples • 137

i have a mother as beautiful as an apple blossom.
people used to pinch my cheeks saying
that the apple never falls far from the tree

April Gray Wilder

Precipitation • 138

The cloud above Wikitoria’s house is ripe red in the middle and any day now her child will drop onto the nest she and Pim fashioned from the best brand of air pockets money can buy.

Contributor Notes & Artist Statements • 142

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