Issue 151
Winter & Spring 2017
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Welcome to TriQuarterly 151. I am excited to present you with this issue of pieces that explore the challenges of living in a world with so much change, fear, and uncertainty. We open with the video essays “Rendering,” by Allain Daigle, and “Of the Hearts,” by Taney Kurth. Though very different in both content and form, each explores absence: in Daigle, paragraphs excised from a book's pages; in Kurth, the hole in a baby's heart. The poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in this issue also address absence, often turning to self-examination in search of the missing. In “Hamartia: The Failure to Recognize,” Rachel Toliver realizes her figurative blindness reduces her individual neighbors to mere backdrops in her own life. Tiffany Austin’s “A South in Sound: Photo Essay” presents a documentary and poetic portrait of the spaces in the Delta, revealing the beauty of land and people. Whether it is a boy’s curiosity about the fence along a territorial border in Claire Polder’s “The Men on the Fence” or the extreme conditions of an individual life in an ever-changing world in Chelsea Dingman’s poem, “When the World,” the pieces in this issue present many different points of view of changes, both past and present, that the world offers us on personal, societal, and political levels.
I'm also pleased to note that this issue includes a number of unsolicited submissions. We're happy to bring this mix of established and emerging writers to our readers.
Thanks to the contributors, editors, and staff.
I now invite you to enjoy TriQuarterly 151.
Cheers,
Noelle Havens-Afolabi
Managing Editor: Noelle Havens-Afolabi
Assistant Managing Editor: Carrie Muehle
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Film Editor: Kristen Radtke
Fiction Editors: Carrie Muehle, Marina Mularz, 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: Aaron DeLee, Adam Lizakowski, Ahsan Awan, Andrea Garcia, Aram Mrjoian, Bonnie Etherington, Caitlin Sellnow, Dan Fliegel, Devin O'Shea, Emily Barton, Hillary Pelan, Jame Berg, Jen Lawrence, Jennifer Companik, Katie Hartsock, Michi Smith, Marla Weeg, Megan Sullivan, Molly Sprayregen, Myra Thompson, Nathan Renie, Pascale Bishop, Paula Root, Sara Connell, Tara Stringfellow.
Image from Rendering
Prologue: Sunflower
The sun was roasting him. And the Southern road was swallowing him up. The land seemed ravenous. And there was a hunger in his head that had been there for a long time.
The Men on the Fence
The boy watches them from the outdoor pool, the men on the fence, perched like birds on a wire. They are present every day, from the moment the boy opens his shutters in the morning until his parents send him to bed at night.
The Man Who Was Afraid of Children
It was always the same—the breathlessness, the palpitating heart, the constricted throat. Gasping for air on a street corner or cowering in a doorway as they passed, Martin Reiss suffered from an inexplicable fear of children.
In the Snowy Ruins
A stranger came singing his grief through the snow. He was alone in the bombed shell of the city, which had been abandoned like dozens of others. His voice wailed like the ghost of a train coming home. And with his song, the city awoke.
Selling Death
Here comes sad-smiling Death, carting his hairy bag of calamities. He stomps his toe-pinching boots around the pastel neighborhood, knocks with sharp knuckles, folds open the bag to show what he has to sell. The mothers say, “Not today. Sorry.”
A Little Bird Told Me
They say Aunt Jane had birds in her head. Each time she had a thought she didn’t speak out loud, it turned into a bird. When she had a lot of thoughts, the birds would build up and chirp and twitter and peck at the sides of her skull to be let out. They gave her terrible headaches.
Happier Lives
William Webber swiveled in his office chair, sucking on a cough drop. Leo Shea, the woman, perched on a less vital chair. It was a cold room. Carpet. Gray walls. Ceiling of exposed plumbing.
The Gone and the Going Away
Through the small window in her mother’s kitchen, the back lot is barren. Treeless, grassless. Nothing grows. November is always cold in Iğdır, always gray. Her mother moves into the doorway. Ceylan can feel her, the disturbance of air.