Issue 151
Winter & Spring 2017
-
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
Brief Color
The milk’s spill reflects red next to the torn bear’s heart.
While making dinner, I speak to my vanished brother. He announces
a black dog carrying in a gift of glistening pig bone
from a field filled with butterflies filled with hunger.
Poem with Flower as Central Image
Last time you called me flower
I punched you in the face.
Who needs a blood bank now?
Self-Portrait as Girl Being Led On
I watched them do it,
their small, fat fingers taking
to the swell of chest a blunt scalpel
and peeling, no, sawing into stomach
Bungee Jumping
Before the woman leaps off the 160-foot platform, she sees
the tear-colored ghost of her body.
Far below, beneath her, a man watches. He's gracefully hauled
her sweaty backpack, weighed down
Nobody told the morning to arrive
or the vans
to empty
or the tractor’s ripper
to split
the earth & everything else.
When the World
shows us that it’s incapable
of mercy, we stay up all night
and practice how to be merciful
On the Water Taxi across the Potomac After Rehab
Long after
her fears had passed my daughter asks
me why the river never flows back.
I tell her that it’s like how bones
Yes, I Would Like to Imagine the Self
as a bird or a plane far
from our abhorrent geometries. No
one has a box shaped like
a heart, a tambourine, a set
Hysterectomy/Recovery
Though I didn’t know how to begin or believe, I held in
myself expectation. Awareness. A palpable fit. Every garden
a window through which I petalled off hopes. There was nothing
Angels of Paradise
After Marc Chagall
Come with me.
Let me show
you the blue
field of light
that soothes aching