Fairy Tale Review: The Yellow Issue #9

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Yellow Issue

FOUNDER & EDITOR

Kate Bernheimer, University of Arizona

GUEST EDITOR, THE YELLOW ISSUE

Lily Hoang, New Mexico State University

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Sylvia Chan, Anne Doten, Colin Hodgkins, Laura I. Miller, University of Arizona

ADVISORY BOARD

Donald Haase, Wayne State University

Maria Tatar, Harvard University

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Timothy Schaffert, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

ORIGINAL PRINT DESIGN

J. Johnson, DesignFarm

COVER ART (INSIDE FRAME)

Kiki Smith, Born

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

LAYOUT

Caitlin Alvarez, Allie Maher, Tara Reeser, English Department’s Publications Unit, Illinois State University

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

www.fairytalereview.com

Electronic edition © 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. Originally © 2013 by Wayne State University Press.

The Yellow Issue (2013) 978-0-8143-4178-0

FAIRY TALE REVIEW is devoted to contemporary literary fairy tales and hopes to provide an elegant and innovative venue for writers working with the aesthetics and motifs of fairy tales. How can fairy tales help us to go where it is we are going, like Jean Cocteau’s magical horse? We hope to discover. Please know that Fairy Tale Review is not devoted to any particular school of writing, but rather to original work that in its very own way is imbued with fairy tales.

It’s going to be very lonely on that Yellow Brick Road now.

—Ray Bolger

FAIRY TALE REVIEW

The Yellow Issue

ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS

LILY HOANG

Guest Editor’s Note

When I was a girl, my father used to tell me how yellow I was. I thought yellow was a metaphor. I didn’t think he literally meant yellow. Yellow was the color of my soft baby blanket and boiled egg yolk. Yellow was the color of newly hatched chicks and banana peels. Yellow was not my color.

EMILY CARR

Resurrection Refrains: 22 Tarot Lyrics in the Form of the Yellow Brick Road

The day after tomorrow is a miracle of interior.

Is broken pottery.

Is papier mâché. Serious watercolour.

Gone past the promise of carnations. Orange stripe across a Eucharist sky.

Has edges.

So do you. Jumps: your skin swims out to the limit of sound.

BETSY CORNWELL

The If-Tree

/Once there was a princess named Philo and the fairies stole her away while she was walking with her mother, who was also a princess, so says the book. They hid her in a lovely palace but she still felt trapped. She had one friend only, and a maid who looked like a snake, and she and her friend liked to go walking in the lemon grove that surrounded their beautiful palace.

SANDRA DOLLER

Fairy Tale for the Suburban Makeover

Grass and a tree with a tire swing were fine for active, growing kids. Once the youngsters reached college age, though, the family decided it was time for change.

ESPIDO FREIRE

Translated by Toshiya Kamei

With No Fairy

Sleeping Beauty still waits. She dreams: in the hundred years that she has slept, she has never stopped dreaming, even for a second, of the moment that the prince will wake her with a kiss, but a hundred years have passed, and it doesn’t look like tomorrow will be any different from today.

CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH

The Colorists

Once there was a family of wanderers who arrived to a small village by the ocean. They were gaunt with flat hay-colored hair and their nails were stained purple from dying fabrics. Their people had been traveling from island to island for centuries before and for centuries to come.

JOSHUA HELMS

The Girl in the Sky

When Ms. Collins asked Kate about the girl with wings, Kate climbed upon the table and jumped down, her arms spread wide. The fall was only three feet, but she landed lightly as if she were made of air. Several of her classmates put down their crayons and their building blocks and their picture books and they watched Kate, who climbed upon the table again, spread her arms, and jumped.

ANNA MARIA HONG

Holey Sonnets: Rapunzel

under snow’s neutral

tattoo the plait unrolling

blue fury slurred

KIM HYESOON

Translated by Don Mee Choi

39.5 Celsius

An old female pumpkin walks into the sunlight

Someone enters the pumpkin

That someone flattens the insides of the pumpkin with a wooden roller

the yellowish red fibrous rooms extend in all directions

a forked lane flickers by in between them

LO KWA MEI-EN

Pinnochia from Pleasure Island

Now I think of what I’d die to forget. Now I forget.

Where did I grow up, get out—was I as rich as a golden

yolk waiting to crack in the hay? Where I come from

would I go back? If yes, reload me.

BEN LOORY

The Lemon Tree

A farmer was wandering through his orchard at harvest time, when he saw an apple hanging from one of his lemon trees. He frowned at it a while, and then went and fetched a ladder, and climbed up and plucked it from the branch.

DAWN MANNING

Cinder

When the cinder blazed out of Eden

her wings mistaken for flaming swords

she first circled the earth in fire before her

dragon-body turned to ash. Millennia

passed before she could conjure another.

PETER MARKUS

from In a House in a Woods

The boys did not take their time, this time, as they walked through the woods to get to the part of the woods where the witch lived. They did not stop to look at the trees or the dirt that they walked on. This was not that kind of a walk through the woods.

ZACHARY MASON

A Successful Rise

One day a tengu of the lower rank saw a squire and his wife move into a house in the middle of his wood. The wife, who was barely twenty, and had black eyes and skin like snow, was prone to sitting in her window and staring out into the trees.

JANET MCNALLY

What the Baby Tells Me

This is how you grow: sunlight

safe inside willow leaves, hard as amber

pale as citrine. Flower stalk, a lupine

dream. You’ll climb and you’ll climb

LINCOLN MICHEL

And That Is How They Found Me

You know that twisting feeling you get when you look around and grasp the world is not what you thought it was? That happened to me when I realized that all of my friends were wolves. Just minutes before we had been drinking cheap red wine and talking about our favorite TV shows and now they were naked and rubbing against me with their fur.

SHAWN ANDREW MITCHELL

The Hillbilly in My Pocket

So I’m home and my dad presents me with a pocket-sized hillbilly. I’m there in the living room with the recliner’s leg-rest kicked out, my mom and my girlfriend Elizabeth bonding over my dad’s and my faults, and my dad tilts his head and leads me into the kitchen. He plucks the little redneck from a navy blue cotton pouch and sits him down gently on the table.

THERESA O’DONNELL

Sugar Snatch

He had been watching me in between plays as I bent over and sank into the splits and did handsprings (cause I’m on the cheerleading squad) and he told me I was making him H-O-T.

BEN PELHAN

A Real Cinderella Story

hey.

she shouldn’t have worn

glass slippers.

NICK FRANCIS POTTER

Josh Henderson Is Anne Boleyn

There was a queen situation earlier this week when Josh Henderson, devilishly, was Anne Boleyn—a regrettable decision in retrospect.

SHELLEY PUHAK

Snow White and the Seven Satellites

A star needs a satellite like a fish needs

a bicycle. Imagine seven bicycles. Imagine

so many spoked mouths gaping in the garage

MARTHE REED

Yellow Once

Once upon a time

Once

A long time ago

A mother

A braided cloud about her head

A woman a mother once

LI SUNG

The Serpent and the Mouse

licking the shell of a nut

i spit a cloud shrouding the moon

CETORIA TOMBERLIN

Yellow Songs

Goldilocks

Take it from me, Honey

they’re all bears. It’s just

you find, a little later

you’re into that.

BRANDI WELLS

In Which Hansel Is Gretel and Gretel Is Hansel

This hurts a lot, but it’s true. It is astral projection gone wrong.

MARIA XIA

Hans Christian Andersen Dreams

Hands hanging over the sides of the bed, Hans Christian Andersen watches life shucking away from him. Layer upon layer peel off, like the outer sheaves of corn on the cob. Soon there will only be the glinting little white nubs remaining. Shamefully essential things! Each one looks like a misshapen tooth—he can see how teeth are useless when arranged radially outward from a center.

CHANGMING YUAN

Two Poems

Yes, we are father and son, but so often

Did I doubt this simple small biofact:

We could never say more than three short

Sentences to each other when we met

Contributor Notes

GUEST EDITOR’S NOTE

When I was a girl, my father used to tell me how yellow I was. I thought yellow was a metaphor. I didn’t think he literally meant yellow. Yellow was the color of my soft baby blanket and boiled egg yolk. Yellow was the color of newly hatched chicks and banana peels. Yellow was not my color. But my father was insistent: we are yellow people. My father told me that yellow people are not liked, they are looked down upon, but yellow people are also the most diligent, they suffer better than other kinds of people, they endure and prosper. He endowed the color yellow with a story, one that remains with me to this day.

One translation of my last name is yellow. Another is golden. Another might be royal. One word and look at the variations. Every time I meet someone with a permutation of my surname—Wang, Hwang, Wong, Huang, etc.—I ask them how they translate it. Many of them go with yellow, which is surprising to me: it’s the least impressive, least elegant of the possible translations.

In Nox, Anne Carson’s elegy for her brother, she writes: I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for a light switch. Carson gropes in the room for translation, but for me, the fairy tale begins when the yellow light magically appears, the same pale yellow light that magically appears with the quick flick of electricity. Its effects are—incandescent, illuminating, a nested home. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard speaks about the reverie of our childhood home. The reverie that emerges from Bachelard’s daydream has the same effect as the fairy tale. The fairy tale is a space for respite, for understanding, for home. The fairy tale is a return: to story, to family and memory, to translation, enlightening.

This issue is themed around yellow: the color of my skin, my namesake, the color used to describe four billion plus Asians, and this doesn’t even account for the diasporic population. Yellow, the color of diseased skin and diseased people. Yellow, the color of aging. All these denigrations contained in one color, none of which actually resemble the color itself. Because yellow is bright. It is electric. It inspires.

And the works in this issue are as effulgent as yellow itself, but lurking—as yellow always lurks—is something sinister and bold, the color forcing itself up and out, revealing, transforming. Yellow yields metamorphosis.

And so I invite you in. But be careful to follow the road made of golden bricks: we don’t know what translation of yellow might appear to terrorize and delight, but oh no!, the door has closed and you’re already here, so either tiptoe forth with caution or come with sword drawn. Turn the page and endure. Maybe there’s a pot of gold at the end. Maybe a gold medal. Either way, it’s worth a daydream.

—Lily Hoang¹

Note

1. Lily Hoang is Fairy Tale Review’s third and final Guest Editor in a series of three—yes, three, appropriate for fairy tales—guest-edited issues. Guest Editors were invited to curate contents based on their own impressive contributions as authors of fantastic fiction, in tandem with their impressive awareness of 21st century contemporary fiction and poetry. Lily Hoang’s innovative 2013 issue (The Yellow Issue) follows the amazing contributions in 2012’s Guest Editor Alissa Nutting (The Grey Issue) and 2011’s Guest Editor Timothy Schaffert (The Brown Issue) (from which a story appears in this year’s O. Henry Prize Anthology). As the Founder and Editor of Fairy Tale Review, I am delighted to announce that I will return to my cherished role with manuscript selection for the journal with 2014’s Tenth Anniversary Issue, The Emerald Issue. I will be working with screeners in the MFA Program at the University of Arizona and around the country, along with Timothy Schaffert. Submission guidelines may be