C.S.E. Cooney

Dear Mademoiselles,

The recent launching of your Spring 2009 issue (http://goblinfruit.net/2009/spring/) called my attention anew to several anomalies surrounding your magazine. My purpose thus in writing is twofold. First, to illuminate for an innocent and unwitting public what your editorial wiles sought to obscure in simile and metaphor. Second, to adjure you, by all that is wholesome and clean, not to release the Summer 2009 issue before seriously considering the cataclysmic repercussions.

Have you failed to notice that since goblinfruit began publishing poetic treatments of subjects best left alone, i.e., "mythology" and -- worse -- "folklore," the number of maidens who leave the sanctity of home in black chariots drawn by six black horses has skyrocketed from 3% to 67%? Has it escaped your awareness that 4 out of 7 lads, encouraged by the ardor of their female peers, grow up to be those self-same black horses instead of the proper young men their mothers bore them to be?

On the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, the number of deaths caused by tourists accidentally slipping on empty seal skins has quadrupled. Once again sirens sing from any exposed bit of rock-slime, luring everyone from SCUBA divers to parasailors to inappropriate, untimely and ostentatious demises. The suddenly brisk trade of spindles, honey and forests retreats (towers being most popular with huts a close runner up) has broken more than a few high-traffic sites of our finest on-line vendors.

In just this last year, solely due to your efforts to increase the presence of "fantastical" poetry in 21st century publishing, wolves and coyotes have returned to every major city in the states. (We will not speak of their lascivious behavior, their alarming tendency to take the shape of our deepest desires, their vulgar attire of blue jeans and T-shirts with rude slogans, their jeering grins and wagging tails, as they strut around our dance clubs and sports bars, seducing the best of our young men and women. Of these matters it is best to remain reticent.)

Mademoiselles, if you have done all this in three years, what might the next three bring? The monstrosity -- the perversion -- that is Goblin Fruit Magazine must CEASE.

tithenai, mer_moon, ladies of goblinfruit, I know what you are. Even knowing this, I abase myself to beg you: Burn the manuscripts set to be published in Summer 2009. Delete the files. Wipe your hard drives.

Above all, you must not feature the eldritch and perilous Mme. wirewalking as your Summer Poetess; she has powers undreamed of by the greatest minds of Man. Risk her writing, risk upheaval to natural order.

One of the great benefits of our age is life free of magic, a world rid of demons and the pale ghosts of drowned brides. There is no place for the likes of you and your magazine in modernity.

Sincerely,

A Concerned Citizen