Issue 146
Summer & Fall 2014
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Issue 146 opens with Brian Bouldrey's beautiful and devastating video essay "Dead Christ." Hans Holbein’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (a detail of which also serves as the issue’s cover art) acts as a gateway for Bouldrey to explore death and grief, pain and suffering, love and hope. “You out there, watching with me, hear me in the dark, and remind me I’m alive,” Bouldrey says.
If there’s a unifying theme for Issue 146 it’s that pulsing desire to be heard in the dark. The fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in this issue are provocative and gut-wrenching, illuminating the trappings of existence in unique ways. Mystery, pain, grief, joy, love, hope abound.
Wherever you’re reading Issue 146, whether in bed or beside a stranger on the train, when you’re finished and you've exhaled, allow whoever’s near to wonder where you’ve been and how you’ve changed—come alive—after TriQuarterly.
Cheers,
Adrienne Gunn
Managing Editor: Adrienne Gunn
Assistant Managing Editor: Noelle Havens
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Literary Editor: S.L. Wisenberg
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Film Editor: John Bresland
Fiction Editors: Carrie Muehle, Dan Schuld, Ankur Thakkar, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editor: Karen Zemanick
Poetry Editor: C. Russell Price
Social Media Editor: Ankur Thakkar
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Alex Miner, Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson
Undergraduate Intern: Brooke Wanser
Staff: Ahsan Awan, Rebecca Bald, Jen Companik, Jim Davis, Jennifer Deeter, JL Deher-Lesaint, Aaron DeLee, Jesse Eagle, Jeshua Enriquez, Dan Fliegel, Dane Hamann, Ish Harris-Wolff, Beth Herbert, Alex Higley, Martha Holloway, Barbara Tsai Jones, Katharine Kruse, Jen Lawrence, Adam Lizakowski, Robin Morrissey, Marina Mularz, Troy Parks, Amber Peckham, Miyako Pleines, Lydia Pudzianowski, Nate Renie, Mark Rentfro, Paula Root, Caitlin Sellnow, Michi Smith, Megan Sullivan, Adam Talaski, Myra Thompson, Ted Wesenberg, Carol Zsolnay
Image from Dead Christ
Eulogy for Nigger
DETROIT. Hundreds of onlookers cheered… as the National Association of Colored People put to rest a long-standing expression of racism by holding a public burial for the N-word . . . Two Percheron horses pulled a pine box adorned with . . . a black ribbon printed with a derivation of the word. The coffin is to be placed at historically black Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery. —Associated Press, July 9, 2007
Reflections, While Sitting in Traffic
How I remember your voice on the phone but not the last thing I said to you, the last thing you said to me, how I didn’t leave my husband, how I went back to Miami last summer and was having tostones at La Granja when I saw your brother sitting there having pollo con papas, how he didn’t even recognize me, how he looked older, like a man with a job, how you would be proud to see this man, to know him…
The Western Uncanny
Let us say you are walking near a wetland where red-winged blackbirds nest. You are absorbed in conversation, in a human and social world. Then, over your head and just behind it, the air creases and rips. How do you know—before you even know—to duck, to avoid?
Who’s Afraid of Helen of Troy
If I hear you once more say the word love, I’ll take the imaginary child, his hair gleaming on my shield, or reflected in your Subaru’s window, and present him on a platinum platter for the Cyclops to devour for the world’s amusement. This is commensurate with the nature of my powers and the natural state of a healthy relationship, not to mention the good of the polity.
Ictalurus Punctatus
The mouth alone must be over a foot wide, and the fan-like tail is kicking up mud some four feet away. My father says no, it is only three feet. He was a chemist and is careful with his measurements. Still, those whiskers, tangling with the sedge along the shallow banks of the Hennepin Canal, I half expect to turn into whips.