Issue 148
Summer & Fall 2015
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Issue 148 opens with Kelly Sears’ video essay “Pattern for Survival.” Sears juxtaposes militaristic, first aid, and fitness imagery with text from the US Army Survival Manual: “A key ingredient in any survival situation is the mental attitude of the individual(s) involved.” An ensemble of gifted authors study survival and the human experience throughout Issue 148. The fiction investigates characters’ mental attitudes when confronted with devastating circumstances. The poems examine snapshot-like moments imbued with both beauty and violence. The nonfiction observes life’s turning points and draws sense and order out of the small details of life. How do we survive being human? Through this mosaic of experiences, we begin to understand.
With Issue 148, we say good-bye and thank you to John Bresland, who inaugurated TQ's publication of video essays and cinepoems in Issue 141, and who has made TQ an important participant in that vibrant genre ever since. He's passing the torch to Kristen Radtke, whose "That Kind of Daughter" appeared in John's very first issue.
This summer, TriQuarterly began a complete upload of all 137 print issues of the magazine. Every cover and page of TQ’s entire history will soon be available to readers around the world. We are thrilled to share decades of ground-breaking fiction, nonfiction, and poetry without any cost to readers. Read our newest issue, or read our archive, but come on in and spend some time with TriQuarterly.
Cheers,
Adrienne Gunn
Managing Editor: Adrienne Gunn
Assistant Managing Editor: Noelle Havens
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Film Editor: John Bresland
Fiction Editors: Carrie Muehle, Ankur Thakkar, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editor: Martha Holloway
Poetry Editor: Dane Hamann
Social Media Editor: Ankur Thakkar
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Alex Miner, Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson
Staff: Ahsan Awan, Emily Barton, Jen Companik, Aaron DeLee, Jesse Eagle, Jeshua Enriquez, Dan Fliegel, Ish Harris-Wolff, Alex Higley, Barbara Tsai Jones, Katharine Kruse, Jen Lawrence, Robin Morrissey, Marina Mularz, Troy Parks, Lydia Pudzianowski, Nate Renie, Mark Rentfro, Paula Root, Caitlin Sellnow, Michi Smith, Adam Talaski, Myra Thompson, Ted Wesenberg
Image from Pattern for Survival
Descend lentement le boulevard Saint-Michel en rêvant
We are walking among the sycamores
you know where we are
you with your hair parted sharply on the side
me with my dragon shooting water from its mouth
The Skirt Dripping Sea
The sky has been curdling for days—
the slow-bloom of pale tumors
drifting against the oily lid of slate grey.
Smoke tusks coil from burning leaf piles
The Address Painters
Again this summer, lugging
behind them their red wagons stacked
with paint cans, they are coming.
Backwater Blues, 1927
A man’s life isn’t worth mule piss
in those levee and lumber camps,
skillet-black bears, panthers,
cottonmouths as fat as a dead man’s arm,
Figure Drawing
On the way to your studio, a Cooper’s hawk
dove in front of me. It left clutching yellow leaves
and not a single sparrow. I knew then,
somehow, that I would never take my own life.
he unbuttons my shirt & i light a flame of junebugs
maybe there’s duct tape
in his pocket a butterfly
purple & knifed this a spoonful
of eleven p.m.
on a stranger’s lap
Still Life with Small Objects of Perfect Choking Size
Artwork by Erica Harney
Nothing so obvious as a gumball,
a coin. Instead, the cap
to the chapstick, or, somehow,
the moon: Lips parted, tongue
The Folding In
The mind too has its autumns—the dead hours
that, windblown, gather into canceled years.
Here the failures, of nerve or desire,
accrue, cling with the cold interest of snow.