Fairy Tale Review

by Unknown

  Trees sawed to stumps

  sprouting

  Beyond the field another field

  and another another

  Smelling cut hay

  I feel again

  (desideratum)the whole

  distant

  green

  kingdom

  gone

  Scarecrow, be glad I have no knife

  all of this world has made me wrathful

  (On the other side of the wall

  she masturbatesYou unplug the refrigerator

  to listen more closely)

  Maybe someday cut hay will be

  only cut hay

  MARTA PELRINE-BACON

  Girls Underground

  REBECCA PEREA-KANE

  The Kunstkamera, St. Petersburg

  In the gummy chemicals of 18th century preservation: the double liquid gaze of a two-headed lamb.

  Two dogs in the hills above the

  Volga circle the farmer in a heavy coat, hooded,

  because the lambs come before full sunlight.

  The farmer finds the balanceless creature toddling to the ewe,

  who nudges it as it begins to nurse, long tail wagging.

  He doesn’t tell anyone, not his wife. He nests them

  in the woodshed. Two trembling noses nuzzling for warmth.

  Sucking each other’s ears, four eyes closing. Their mother stands by

  bleating soft murmurs, chewing knots of hay the farmer leaves for her.

  But the boy who helps with the lambing must have seen.

  Because when they die on the fourth day as it begins to rain

  and the farmer lays them down again, still just warm,

  on the pile of brush cleared to burn

  a man comes in uniform with a decree from Peter I

  and a wagon clattering crates.

  The envoy stands stiff against the mist, cranks the small body

  into a box with a scrape of unhinged featherlight bones.

  As the ewe stands by on the slope with whiteless eyes and no sound

  the farmboy bends to a snow crocus so winter-famished for light

  he can see it unfurling. Its anthered chalice fills and fills with rain,

  and the flower swallows, and fills again.

  AIMEE POKWATKA

  Ashes

  My dear, I must have been dreaming. I scattered ashes on the path. He tells me his house lies deep in the forest. I follow him, tell him my story, hoping it’s enough to keep me safe. He picks locks, fills his birdcage with trinkets and jewels. The house pulses with my fear. I follow him. I tell him my story, about ashes on the path, about the birdcage and the finger with the tiny ring. My dear, I must have been dreaming. I tell him the finger was mine. He tells me his house lies deep in the forest. He picks locks and steals jewels. He fills his birdcage, and I follow him, hoping it’s enough to keep me safe. He tells me I must have been dreaming. He tells me to scatter my fear on the path. He fills his fingers with mine. I follow him to his house deep in the forest. My story is not enough to keep me safe. I’m a jewel in a birdcage. I’m a trinket. I’m ashes scattered on the path. He pulses. He keeps the tiny ring on my finger. My dear, I must have been dreaming.

  RACHEL RICHARDSON

  The Bear’s Wife

  Always we Hatfields have lived here. My daddy’s daddy’s daddy Ephraim and his son Ephraim and then there’s my own daddy, Devil Anse, and all of them and all of us to come will forever live here. We now are thirteen altogether, brothers Johnse and Joseph and Cap and Tennis, Elliott, Elias, Troy, Willis, and Robert E. Lee, and my sisters Mary, Betty, and Rosie, all before me, Nancy, called Nan. All that unpleasantness with them over the river is dead now, alongside half them all, hell have them. We took more of them than they of us but we’re not so many as we once was. Bad teeth. Green sores. Cousin Deacon had his leg off after a night lost in the snow—he say he got turned around but we all kenned he was lit to something. Hatfields don’t get lost.

  Even me, gone as I can get, never don’t know where I’m at. Littlest, I hide easy. Littlest, I learned to sneak. I was relations ten times over before I could crawl, somebody’s niece or sister or second-cousin, so when I could walk didn’t no one miss me, especially.

  I walk far. I walk all into the woods and up over cliffs and through the trees and I keep nothing on my feet all the while. I hears everything that happens in our woods. The deers whisper. Raccoons mumble and squirrels natter endless but it’s all noise I don’t much turn towards. Better them than the squalling of toothy babies and Devil Anse holding up his snakes as he calls to the angels. I can’t hear the snakes—I hear just the woolly ones, fox and hares, bats.

  I am shy on ten and a half on this day when I hears what is no secret but what is not what I want heard anyhow. My blood has begun and won’t be hid. I ken what it means even without Rosie and Betty and Mary telling but they tell me anyhow, all three of them fat again with babies in their guts. They pushes me to Mamy Levicy and says look, Mamy Levicy, look at little sister, she is little woman at last.

  Mamy Levicy plaits my yellow hair and tells me how it will be as if I don’t know, as if cousins and uncles and brothers hadn’t all been up in me to their knuckles a hundred dozen times already. But nothing ever took and now, say Mamy Levicy, my inside is ready to house the babies I was born and built to make. Mamy praises all and thanks our Lord and I wait to sneak but it’s not long as the spirit takes her wholly and I flee. I am out and Mary gets hollering and Rosie and Betty join in and soons the guns go off and the whole clan comes looking but I know the woods best and I know where to go.

  I run past the creeks and over logs toppled soft with moss. I splash puddles and snap branches and all while hearing behind me my brothers clamoring but I will not be got. I don’t ken towards no Lord but I pray in the woods anyhow that they are all three there, Big and Bigger and Biggest, names I given them when they said they didn’t want no Hatfield names, being they weren’t no men.

  That’s how they call me Scrapefoot. They gives me the name when they seen my feet as tore up as they were the first time I find them all years back now. You don’t feel that? asked Bigger. None much, I say. They tried a heap of other callings on me, Furgone and Ochrehead, but I answered to none but Scrapefoot. I never felt like no true Nancy anyhow.

  They is all three there, Big and Bigger and Biggest, asleeping. I wake Big with hitting his shaggy shoulder and he swipes his claws at me but I kick him back, tell him it’s me. Bigger wakes first.

  Scrapefoot, says Bigger. Where’s your wind?

  I runned as quick I could. I need help. I’m like to be took and made a mother.

  What is mother? ask Big.

  I can’t tell you now but you have to help me. Mother means I won’t never come back, I says to them. Mother is forever.

  Big and Bigger stand. You are our Scrapefoot, they says. What must we do?

  Keep me here, I says.

  We cannot, say Biggest. This is not for us. This is not of us. Go, Scrapefoot.

  I get hot in my face and stomp, pick up rocks and throw them at Biggest but he is as large as a mountain and more distant than the sun.

  You cannot stay, say Biggest. Winter comes and you are not of us. We do not have yellow hair. We do not adorn ourselves.

  I take Big’s longest claw and saw through my plaits and give them to Biggest who holds them like gold snakes gone dead. I step from my patched gray dress and let myself be so before them. I am one of you, I says. Help me, I says. Help me and you will never hunger again.

  Biggest stands twice as tall as Big and Bigger with more above. We do not want for food, say Biggest. He moves to me and puts his heavy paw on my shorn head with enough muscle to push me straight into the earth forevermore. Ask us what we want.

  You want for me, I says.

  We want for a wife, say Biggest. We want for you.

  You’re collecting firewood. You are less a woman than a collection of aches and sores but the wood must be fetche
d to keep the children warm. Betty and Mary are tending to them while your mother Levicy prays day and night for your sister Nancy’s return and your father furls his snakes about and cries unto heaven. The days go quicker now. Above the sky is flat and white, the forest’s leaves all but fallen. Wherever Nancy is, she is not coming back. You know this but keep the notion to yourself.

  Your arms are filled with tinder and kindling when you spy the shape among the trees and halt, less afraid than confused. The fur is right but the shape is wrong. You step backwards onto a twig that snaps like a bone, but the figure that turns is no beast. She is a girl cloaked in bearskins. A split deer carcass steams before her. She holds a knife fashioned from a half-foot claw, her arm red with blood to the elbow. You meet her face: there is viscera in her mouth, a hood of blackened fur, but beneath you see the golden locks of your smallest sister, Nancy.

  She bares her teeth at you.

  “Nancy,” you say. “You must come back—”

  “I am no Nancy,” she says. “I am Scrapefoot, queen of the bears.”

  “Nancy, please—”

  “I have taken a husband. He is king among the bears, and within me I carry his child, a bear son who will unleash such hell upon earth as none you could ever know.”

  “Nan!”

  She winds her arm as if to pitch the terrible knife. You see beneath her filthy cloak that she is as she says, round with child. “It cannot be,” you say.

  Your sister steps towards you. She is no longer your sister but some halfling, a feral empress, her eyes rimmed red and bright with madness. “It is,” she says. She moves closer, close enough for you to see the scrim of hair on her heavy stomach, her rank fur covered in a swarm of vicious flies.

  “Now go,” she says to you, showing her sharpened teeth, her hot bloodied breath foul in your face. “Go and prepare.”

  Note to Reader: The physical integrity of this work may not register on any e-reader. For the most accurate depiction, please see the print edition.

  BROC ROSSELL

  from Alameda

  Butchers on the jury dispel

  the narrative

  tonic

  increateCeremony of the glands

  bound his own hands

  with a thoroughly modern organization.

  Ruins wept in

  superstitiously

  the Dirt on my feet a part of Me

  but no more than

  1. The present situation

  2. What to do about it?

  3. How to do it?

  Some frigatefrigate birdwoke

  outward, thenupward, long

  split-tail lost on the

  boyit was all right

  turning

  for him the Lambrusco-dizzy

  bloodand air. But

  the world is not like that

  nor will it be

  Frederick

  the Great’s smart Prussian

  uniform, an indication

  of some belief

  in justice. And there it is

  Hölderlin in a bathtub

  uncorked

  the physiognomy of Europe

  pressed against the glass.

  The result

  is a maddening

  emphasis in the original on jouissance,

  parliamentary mechanisms inadequate

  and the musket-ball’s revision

  a counterfeit bill

  lost in the numbers

  of plain speech,

  zeroes and ones adrift

  in the collective

  sensorium

  an alcoholic’sof gray economies

  practical

  value, what Cavell calls

  an “acknowledgment

  maps onto

  an amazing ability to pass on, like

  love

  consonants of weeping,

  vowels of exhaust-

  ive detail,

  cold rage

  at the density of ordnance

  ordained by vision and a meat cleaver,

  “a soft dismission from the sky.”

  A deep and hollow sound

  dropped

  from the old car of success,

  the atomic bombdrunk since 1959

  and the talking cure a pair

  of paper scissors—

  as if you still lived

  with a bang

  Between those people, a good many of them

  identified in the text

  as a command to love the world

  a glass to dress herself with dew

  Whereas Moses

  busy knotting ropes

  to count the snakes

  leaps

  over

  the woman,

  the image of the engine,

  all the bony children,

  absolute desire

  What justice

  there is to be found

  in an alley after dinner

  and there it is

  A quiet one late aerosol summer in the north

  Poppies on brick

  A number of people lying one

  on another bring the dead

  into the place.

  Something very similar

  happens in the second myth

  when the Mermecolion

  of El Cerrito perished

  for lack of prey:

  “Earth, here you have the whole shipwrecked man

  Though, in place of the rest of his flesh,

  You have those that ate it.

  This tabula votivethis wild-wood Ring Pop

  makes one

  linger,

  shower regularly

  in July, wholeeconomies of scale

  in a Burger King

  bathroom.

  The land was secured,

  the people endured,

  I found a whole jar of amanita muscaria

  and neglectedcivil men.

  These very

  artifacts of acceleration

  closing up like like thisdefensible

  planet

  going red to blue in the face a yawn

  fails to obscure.

  Sadness grows on a stem

  in the hour

  small eggs deintegrate

  snakesin the wind.

  Seas

  blush.Alcohol

  chides solar

  ambivalence

  from the chrysalis

  of its host,

  cardinals

  interpellate vapors and gas,

  a moment of reflection

  in the absence of a word.

  Criminal

  how the body

  goes against its own grain,

  thinks big,

  singshymns.

  A sense of humor

  has left me

  hopelessly afflicted

  by

  a distinct lack of concern,

  a sudden caution

  like rain, legs over

  accidental lambs.

  Harder berries don’t beg

  or enter pleas

  unknowing predates defense.

  The figure is vertical

  and the epitaph head-high

  like color, like justice

  Who “In the end held me in

  her grip

  but now

  with digital cameras

  in Bohemia,

  she catalogs

  a celebration

  of interpenetration:

  The bosoms and heads of women,

  The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys,

  not even when the printer

  followed by three short blows

  no longer exists

  do those heaps

  extract evidence.

  This is an open question—

  one evening in late July,

  not too rough

  There’s a simpler way of doing things,

  as when

  repetition congeals

  i
nto a Commonwealth,

  Apoclamation

  for the everyday

  beggar.

  Beethoven, imagining himself a father,

  gathered here

  in reunion

  a corsage as vestibule,

  and distribution

  legendary.

  But when this shall be done let no man

  be found indolent enough to decline

  a little more trouble

  for a good price

  of the government’s views.

  One mustn’t show ill will

  to

  a death certificate.

  The sea as indifferent to life

  as it is to thought

  is the same sea more alone in this

  than we are

  Rumpelstiltskin

  plagiarized the shuttlecock’s endowment

  and went bowling with it.

  “Who Spread its Canopy?

  Or Curtains Spun?

  Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?

  Sappho conjures Aphrodite but O how great it is that no one

  knows my name,

  a Publick Religion

  of Indifference

  pauses a moment to light up

  in a field of dipladenia,