Issue 140
Summer & Fall 2011
-
Welcome to the third issue of TriQuarterly Online. In the year since we launched, we've attracted an enthusiastic audience from around the world, and can boast visitors from over a hundred countries on six continents. In this and every issue you'll find outstanding new fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, plus book reviews, interviews, commentary, and a lively blog. The electronic format also allows us to present work from TriQuarterly's extensive print archives. We look forward to receiving your comments and responses at triquarterlyonline@northwestern.edu.
Managing Editor: Beth Herbert
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Copy Editor: Ruth Goring
Graduate Fellow: Ari Bookman
Book Review Editors: Charles Berret, Tal Rosenberg
Assistant Book Review Editors: Leigh Arber, Karen Zemanick
Fiction Editors: Danielle Burhop, Schuyler Dickson, Tedd Hawks, Sarah Kalsbeek, Ankur Thakkar, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editors: Sarah Hollenbeck, Dana Norris
Poetry Editor: Lana Rakhman
Art Editor: Tien (Mimi) Nguyen
Staff: Melissa Ackerman, Nataly Arber, Emily Ayshford, Rebecca Bald, Alex Bergstrom, Matthew Carmichael, Jen Companik, Katherine Defliese, Vincent Francone, Cathy Gao, Barbara Ghoshal, Katharine Gingrich, Dane Hamann , Noelle Havens, Russ Hicks, Adam Kovac, Jen Lawrence, Sambath Meas, Kevin McFarland, Amanda Morris, Anthony Opal, Hana Park, Lydia Pudzianowski, Mark Rentfro, Paula Root, Daniel Schuld, Virginia Smith, Leah Strauss, Megan Sullivan, Amanda Tague, Elizabeth Winkowski, Whitney Youngs, Matt Zucker
Penelope's Firebird Weft
Red linen wings: orange, long, draping the back of shoulders like a raincoat. It is not the dust, not human ashes in vessels heavy with gray teeth and a chip of bone. Bring out the pencils and remake a self.
Antti Revonsuo
I
The paperboy brought his baby
brother to watch the concrete liquid
slurry out the truck chute into a wellbore.
Red Town #13
Home Depot
your trees are beautiful
in this weak light
spring is so new
it is about to disappear
completely for some
Dancing the Beans
In Trinidad limber women
danced a path of cocoa beans,
do do petit cacao o
hot sun, red-dust. Bare feet
shook loose debris, turned
Contradance
The frame for a large poster reproduction
we stowed in the car, then entered the pub, the waitress
asking about your Reiki book, she too a
practitioner. The journalistic poem
Poetry that Seeks to Solve Riddles and Placate the Masses
In the old western I’ve just been watching,
at the end when the man has been shot twice
in the back and he’s in the ditch twitching,
we’re watching the sun go down in the distance
honors flight to washington
1
yes it is early tuesday
and the before dawn darkness
and we are on pilgrimage
world war two vets for washington
the people want the regime to fall
march, too, this year was nervy, making all
it could of winter’s costume, flaunting snow
and sleet, slapping our stiffening cheeks cold
and red, wearing white well past when it’s called
for, leaving the tree limbs smooth, the buds stalled
backsliding
this miracle begins in the middle
lane: night, fallen: rain, snow, sleet, hail, falling
still: a loose crew of commuters crawling
home on the turnpike. now, here’s the riddle:
sound effects
listen: the people caught near love
canal, in the nevada desert, around
the ukraine city pripyat can tell you
the sounds that precede catastrophe,
Taliban Kill 10 on Aid Trip in Afghanistan
—New York Times, August 7, 2010
And one thinks, of course, of the evolution
of whales, how they left the sea by dint
of drift and flow, lived on land for tens
of millions of years, then slipped back