Issue 144
Summer & Fall 2013
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Next time you see us, things won’t be the same. Our next issue, due to launch in January 2014, will feature an entirely redesigned website that we absolutely cannot wait to share with you. But enough about the future. Let's talk about the present.
Issue 144, our largest online issue to date, is filled with content from emerging and established writers alike. In this issue you’ll find new poems from Marianne Boruch, Kate Braverman, and Stephen Dunn, and potent doses of Americana from Brian Oliu, Annick Smith, and Ron Carlson. We are proud to feature essays from Nicole Walker and Jewell Washington, who celebrates her first major journal publication, and excerpts from forthcoming novels by Juan Martinez and Katharine Beutner. This issue also features another fine series of haunting video essays and cinepoems curated by John Bresland.
A sincere thank you must be given to our dedicated staff of creative writing graduate students and faculty. Issue after issue, they enthusiastically donate their time, energy, and expertise to the journal. They do this not for salaries and perks, but for a passion of the written word and a true appreciation of the TriQuarterly tradition.
When TQ abandoned print to exist exclusively online, we were written off by some in the literary community who suggested “the party was over.” We are happy to report that the party is not over. The poems, stories, and essays (and now video essays and cinepoems) published in TriQuarterly continue to resonate with readers around the world. And, given worldwide electronic access, we can honestly boast our largest readership in the history of the journal. With a complete website redesign on the horizon, the party is just getting started. It goes without saying that digital literature is here to stay. But for those who remain skeptical, I implore you to consider the Internet as a way to access some of the brightest voices in contemporary writing. Great literature is not only a physical thing; it is not something that needs to be shelved like bowling trophies or souvenirs from that family trip to Dollywood. Literature remains the art of all written work, regardless of how or where those writings are experienced.
Since 1964—because of the passion and dedication put forth by past editors Charles Newman, Elliott Anderson, Reginald Gibbons, and Susan Hahn—TriQuarterly has been instrumental in defining the landscape of American literature and beyond. As a result, back issues of the print edition are becoming increasingly rare. Efforts are already underway to digitize our vast archives in order to revive and maintain the rich, ever-important history of TriQuarterly.
As always, thanks for reading, and we welcome feedback at triquarterly@northwestern.edu
Cheers,
Matt Carmichael
Managing Editor: Matt Carmichael
Assistant Managing Editor: Dan Schuld
Faculty Advisors: Alice George, Susan Harris
Literary Editor: S.L. Wisenberg
Film Editor: John Bresland
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Alex Miner, Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson
Copy Editor: Ruth Goring
Graduate Fellow: Benjamin Schacht
Undergraduate Intern: Erik Tormoen
Book Review Editors: Amber Peckham, Matt Wood
Fiction Editors: Carrie Muehle, Dan Schuld, Ankur Thakkar, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editor: Michelle Cabral
Poetry Editor: C. Russell Price
Staff: Ignatius Aloysius, Rebecca Bald, James Temple Berg, Patrick Bernhard, Jen Companik, Tyler Day, Aaron DeLee, Vincent Francone, Dane Hamann, Ish Harris-Wolff, Noelle Havens, Beth Herbert, Alex Higley, Sarah Hollenbeck, Nath Jones, Jen Lawrence, Patrick LeDuc, Mercedes Lucero, Troy Parks, Lydia Pudzianowski, Lana Rakhman, Nate Renie, Mark Rentfro, Paula Root, Tara Scannell, Maureen Searcy, Caitlin Sellnow, Michi Smith, Virginia Smith, Travis Steele, Megan Marie Sullivan, Myra Thompson, Karen Zemanick, Ben Zimmerman
Image from When Walt Whitman Was a Little Girl
To The Listener
you can hear wood breaking you’ve gotten close
in the riverbed with the crowd stacked in and the pallets burning
with a slice of rebar someone flogs a beat onto a paint can
Collected Stories
The scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer
—Walt Whitman
After a day of walking through sun-clutched Virginia, you unlatch
your wool coat and hang it from the ladder. The sleeves of your
blue Oxford rolled back from your wrists.
Cleaning Out
And in the kitchen your whatnot drawer,
graveyard for clever contraptions
that never changed your life
quite the way you’d hoped—the potato
Undressing Myself at the End of Autumn
Cold makes a candelabra of my lungs
at the opened window, blue on blue
behind an unfurnished attic of trees—
fretwork, winter’s glittering liens,
Blessed Apparel
Lord, I see you in a wetsuit. A name tattooed on your thigh.
I don’t know how far I can go in admiring you, in uncovering
your blessed self. I don’t know how persistently I can present my case.
Trans Amore: Auditions
Her summer dress was a hillside in bloom.
Pastel print of gladiolas and allium bathed
in a ginkgo leaf’s green, ruffled around
the bodice, an afternoon held by its white seams
Boys Destroyed: Auditions
My world of boys revolved around spit,
the palmed bet-glue, brawl beginner—
insult’s first cousin. The farthest loogie ruled
the club. So when he spit on my back once
One Theory of Ambition
There’s a patch of plastic trapped
inside the Pacific’s
Northern Gyre where inward
spirals of weather stabilize
water, ensnare its mass
Washing the Elephant
The river will protect you from her
only so much. How can it, perched
as you are on a forehead
the size of a coffee table? As if washing a house
Ars Biologica
Forgive me, for forgiving her,
your birth mother. I am unforgiving
unless for selfish reasons, and it seems my reasons
are as selfish as they come. I am trying
Falling Asleep in a Stranger's Bathtub
There ain’t nothing
Pleasant in this
Life—a death industry
Of skullduggering
Watching How with Long Hair I Am Accepted by the Nevada Four
We come from where women fistfight
Four against none. We are passionate about blimps.
The parking lot
Of the In-N-Out Burger drunk and mock lit:
Four adorable girls and I crush no one’s teeth
Speak, Again
Twice Friar Thomas Byles gave up a spot
in the lifeboats. And so went down with the unsinkable ship
& its confessions: he led a recitation of the rosary
for those kneeling in tuxedos & dresses. The slow slide.
Hurricane Warnings
I rush trembling into the jungle
when he calls. I run through
pineapple plantations, plumeria
passion fruit and mangoes
Felony in Yellow
This is a yellow I’d go to hell for
murder and lie for and even marry.
Autumn demands its own geography
archipelagos, rituals and inventions.
Through Bus Windows: Seattle
We make love on the floor
of your brother's unfurnished guest room,
mornings he walks his postal route.
An apartment complex five blocks
from my parents’ house in View Ridge.
Those Without Final Residence
roam between the bed and the closet.
Whatever in life they were deprived of
they try to claim as theirs.
A Coldness
I don't know if it's a coldness
or just how the body, overloaded,
tends to shut down,
but as my brother neared death
I felt nothing that resembled grief.
The Little Details
The ice-maker in his house is stuck, he says,
a little piece of ice jamming the opening,
and I tell him that the earthquake in Arezzo
was close to where I vacationed last year
when the world was Tuscan and good.