Fairy Tale Review
The White Issue

The White Issue includes new writing by:

Ivy Alvarez, Philip Beidler, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Tony Friedhoff, Arielle Greenberg, Evan Harris, M.C. Hyland, Lesley Jenike, Kamila Lis, Ashley McWaters, Barbara Jane Reyes, Timothy Schaffert, Kurt Schwitters, Bitite Vinklers, Kellie Wells, Imants Ziedonis, Jack Zipes . . .

and one picture of a rabbit.

Please also watch for news about the release of The White Issue Limited Edition CD. The CD will be exclusively on sale via the website . . . and we are very excited about it!

It is being mastered soon and includes music by:

Authros, The Figments, Hypnogaja, Kaitlyn ni Donovan, Little Canada, Little Sue, Liz Brown & Rex Ritter, Ken & Melissa Buck, Michael Lee, Sunset Valley, Swoon 23, Willy Vlautin, and others.

Arielle Greenberg
“Poem with Trodding in It”

No one advises late-night wall colors. They’ll shut you in, they say.
Keep your name a measly gold. Keep it secret.
Dullify it. Same as spending power. Same as the bone
I can’t yank from my wrist, though the birthmark
that was an alarm in every elementary school I attended has vanished
as if cut away. As if I pressed it as hard as I liked with the edge of my nail
until we were exhausted, me and the foreigner under my skin,
the little blinker. Now I want to paint my walls
the color of that mistake. Now everyone distrusts me,
though I never got detention. Now I sink like a bread loaf,
skip like a frog, wear a nightgown with nothing under the arms.
In my skin, in the absence of lace or linen, I carry the musky paint
for my toad-house in the swamp. I live without lights there.
It grows on me. Every year I like it some more.

Kellie Wells
From “Rabbit Catcher of Kingdom Come”

One sudden spring, when trees and flowers, bamboozled by warmth, began budding in February and the prematurely honied air refused to chill again until December, the town of Kingdom Come, Kansas, was beset by a plague of black-tailed jack rabbits that were not only many but jumbo, bigger than great danes they were, gargantuan rabbits, suspiciously well-fed, slavering over the zoysia, plump middles heaving, back feet long and brawny as a sailor’s forearm and ears you could fan a fainting princess with. And not at all timid, never darting under privet or disappearing behind fences at the last minute, but glaring tauntingly at cats and hobbled crones, whom the town feared would be dragged away to an unspeakable end in the riparian thickets whence these strapping rabbits multiplied, their numbers seeming to double each week. They licked their paws and stroked their ears and whiskers while leveling a menacing eye and leering toothily at any passerby bold enough to look them in their flea-bitten mugs. They stood up on their whopping hoppers and waggled their ears, as though receiving a communiqué from jack rabbit HQ, the air crackling with animal electricity, and then they’d charge a neighbor’s chihuahua, the javelin of their ears at a determined tilt, and the runt mutt would leap with a shriek through its doggy door. They hopped defiantly into busy intersections, and cars and trucks, afraid a collision with one of these sturdy lagomorphs would surely cause their vehicles to crumple like beer cans, hit one another and rolled in ditches instead. At night the rabbits drummed their feet so rhythmically the earth seemed to growl and the sleepless citizens of Kingdom Come locked and relocked their doors and windows until the thumping ceased at sunrise. The town was in a pickle, had a big-eared crisis on its hands, fast multiplying pestilence, and, well, it feared for its safety and solitude.

(cont’d in issue)

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