The Translucent Issue

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS BENJAMIN SCHAEFER Editor's Note • 17 When Kate Bernheimer and Managing Editor Joel Hans announced that the thirteenth installment of Fairy Tale Review would be The Translucent Issue, I think we were all curious to see what would emerge as the final product. It was, essentially, a break from tradition. ALICIA BONES How to Be a Vigorous and Hearty Individual Who Is Full of Life • 19 Sam received instructions from his father on his 18th birthday. His father passed on advice he himself had received from scholars and theologians, advice sure to shape his son’s direction for decades to come. BRADLEY SERGIO BRANDT Glaze & Morph • 22 I got my sugar cube. My archangel forms In a circlet of weather. My archangel gathers Plastic bottle caps left In the desert, blue snow. ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN Juniper • 24 The dream collectors’ truck stopped at each house on our street. There was a system: Mondays recycling, Tuesdays dreams, Wednesdays general trash. Lying on the front lawn, I could see the double-wide tires. STEPHANIE CAWLEY Mary Shelley • 27 Did you ever hear a bird, an animal, dismiss its kind? Embroidered gold, the sky, a coast with a heartbeat in it. I am this crushed vowel, this sand on the ground. GILLIAN CUMMINGS Girl Inside a Raindrop • 28 As Lily grew, she tired of this story: The bundle-laden stork that leaves a baby on the stoop to cry like a cock at break of day, rousing the house- hold from sleep. Where was Mama when the stork abandoned her to the door of night? KATHRYN DAVIS The Excursion, An Excerpt from The Silk Road • 36 In the beginning we lived on Fairmount Avenue. Our house was in a row of houses, all of them once grand. Even now you could tell how grand they’d been from the size of the windows, too big for the curtains people on the side streets put up, as well as from the fact that the houses had names like Falkenstein and Versailles and Kenilworth. JONATHAN LOUIS DUCKWORTH Practicing Falconry in a Gyre • 41 Flight feathers already plucked by gale-force friction bodies denuded the instant they leave the glove. KELLY DULANEY A New Way to Break a Body, An Essay • 42 Bare branches hang in strange angles beyond the window—they stob the screen and glass, are stark, bent, black. They stack sharp, black shadows in my lap. There has been snow; there is snow still: black and brown birds lie like black and brown cankers in it. MAJDA GAMA Reflection • 50 Back when humans made objects to be permanent, How a hand must have loved this bright mirror, At once, both tool & art form; delicate yet solid. ANN GLAVIANO Teuthida • 51 The pictures of us are gone to the storm. Mother had put the framed prints upstairs, on the bed in the master bedroom, for safe-keeping: her aunts, long-skirted, on bicycles, her grandmother in a woolen bathing suit, her father making his First Communion. JENNEVA KAYSER Citizens of the Sky & Love Song for Whoever You Become • 59 Me and the bats and the west wind flying! Each star is a window in the wall of a black city with the curtains thrown open— TAISIA KITAISKAIA Sunday Queen & Queen’s Mother & Queen’s Eulogy for Uncle • 61 Queen is free as a mite in the Lord’s mystical eyebrow, growing ears for no reason. MARIE MARANDOLA Call Me Moira, Call Me Angela • 64 The Translucent Issue Poetry Contest Winner as judged by Traci Brimhall call me Darling, darling, but I need a new name to go with the new life I’m claiming—this one’s grown tired of me. I might move to Philadelphia, to French Canada, to those postcard rocks in Arizona. SAM MEEKINGS The Feather Dress • 66 As Lily grew, she tired of this story: The bundle-laden stork that leaves a baby on the stoop to cry like a cock at break of day, rousing the house- hold from sleep. Where was Mama when the stork abandoned her to the door of night? JEFFERSON NAVICKY The Lil’ Bitty Eyeball • 69 The Lil’ Bitty Eyeball rolled the pawnshops in the Valley looking for weed. Not the kind you smoke, but the invasive kind. NAZLI PEARL Hydra • 71 Thinking again. Thoughts have their own parts and I have many thoughts. They sluice in grey veins through their heavy marbled thighs. MAURA PELLETTIERI Mother and Daughterhood • 73 Whether B-Y ever made babies, it does not matter. Whether by motherhood or another way, she came to know death, and then she knew it. It took her fleshy face in its skeletal hands and whispered its heart to her. B-Y had a heart. She was a woman. GRETCHEN STEELE PRATT He Walks Through Appalachia • 93 Up onto their porches, soft with termites and the ferny dampness. He takes a girl’s one possession, a cubic zirconium from her engagement ring, swallows it C SAMUEL REES Syren of the Ditch • 95 When smeared across windows some towns disfigure. Modern leprosaria, noseless faces on the map. This waitress, face birth-marred the wine-silk hue of a blown apart buck, drowns coffee in cups ERIKA RIER Rituals & Stories • 97 ADAM SOTO Animal Fires • 103 The Translucent Issue Prose Contest Winner as judged by Kelly Link He remembered her going off to live on an island in the gulf to study marine biology; that’s where the university was. He and his wife were fromcentralTexas—collegeislandsoundedlikeagag,buttheirdaughter had always cared very deeply about fish. ANASTASIA STELSE Ivory • 113 Here, I am stranger—ochre sand slung against bones, staining sidewalks, socks. Even brick buildings are redder from bloodied wind. CAROLINE BELLE STEWART Man Camp • 114 The men were told to keep their eyes away. New railroad men—in town just as we girls returned to girls’ school. We walked in twos or more. ELIZABETH HORNER TURNER Smalldom • 119 The year I lived in the snail shell was a private one. Not lonely, no, but for me and me alone. It was beautiful. The sun when it poured through the shell, the opaque glow—it was heaven. SARA WAINSCOTT Ocean Is Behind Her • 121 The nimbus on her head is best but I picture instead a crown of roses because my fascinations are my fascinations and I don’t fight them. KEVIN WILSON A Spirit Rising and Falling • 126 There were two brothers; they took care of each other. Their mother had died giving birth to the younger brother, left them and never came back. Their father had only a passing interest in his sons, spent most of his time in his lab working on solvents and compounds that would either ease or intensify suffering. SHELLEY WONG Winter Pineapple with Sea • 132 When the sun pierces my brick turret, I awaken with drawn-out limbs. I’m a spare dancer, dreamless in a beam of dust. RACHEL ZAVECZ # Belial • 134 SunTM sliding his sharpened pink&black tongue along the edge of the wire-wrapped dagger, “Move your phone closer so it looks more like a selfie” Contributor Notes • 144

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