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
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.
Cabello: Reflections on Black Hair and Beauty
None have I known more sweetly feminine, more unswervingly loyal, more desperately earnest, and more instinctively pure in body and in soul than the daughters of my black mothers.
-W. E. B. Du Bois
Dove Hunters
On our honeymoon, Martin and I stop in Shanghai to visit my father. One afternoon we go to the market. It is not the tourists’ market, there are no shirts proclaiming joy in machine-inked strokes.
A Few Homologous Traits
The Sidetracked Messenger
Rain caught people by surprise, so they turned their collars up, and looked at the ground as they made their way through the downpour. Nobody was paying attention out on the street, until the crash: a car sped through a light that had just turned red, colliding with a messenger on a bike.
Caracas is not Paris
Caracas is nothing like Paris you said. As if any place could be like Caracas. Cesar Vallejo had also lived in Paris and had died in that massive city of alleys and rancid puddles of human piss stinking up the subways.
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.
Chris Jericho & How The World Ends
The beauty of this is that we saw it coming: waking up in the morning to reports that the other side of the world has gone black—that the future is here but we can only see where it is not; cloaked in past, all of the lights out.
An Unkindness of Ravens
“I’m going to kill him,” my husband, Erik, says. This seems like a normal response to finding out someone molested a little kid at the daycare where your son goes every day.
The Dream within the Dream
We had a dream together. Something about a checkpoint. The soldier said please and thank you because you told him that he had to and for some reason he obeyed you and he didn’t even point his gun at us and he was only four feet tall. We felt bad for him.
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.
Gray Gumbo
The clay flat at Locomotive Springs on the desolate northern tip of the Great Salt Lake is made of gray gumbo, a clay in which only dog sage will grow, and bitter-leaved weed, which is a dun green and ugly and which no animal can eat.
Verdi, an excerpt from Crossing the Plains with Bruno
I have crossed into southwest Minnesota on the Laura Ingalls Wilder Highway 14 and feel the Midwest like rheumatism in my bones. The land changes from plains at Volga to rolling croplands pocked by lakes and ponds and patches of hardwood forests.
Divide, an excerpt from Crossing the Plains with Bruno
Swooping down from the Continental Divide along Lewis and Clark’s trail on Highway 200, I leave the evergreen forests on the west side of Rogers Pass and descend to wind-struck plains. The change in topography is startling.
Domokun in Fremont
Iberia’s mom’s name is the prettiest name. Like don’t even try, don’t even pretend you could find a better name out there. Because you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t even come close.