Issue 153
Winter & Spring 2018
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Welcome to TriQuarterly Issue 153. Launching an issue at the beginning of a new year means that much of the preparation takes place as the old year draws to a close. We assembled the final versions of the poems, stories, essays, and videos for this issue at a time when television programming and social media feeds abounded with yearend photo retrospectives. Everywhere we turned, we were met with some of the most compelling images of 2017—images that ranged from aerial views of the Women’s March in Washington, DC, with thousands of posterboard signs bouncing above thousands of pink-eared hats, to images of refugees touching ground at the end of long and treacherous journeys. Through these images, we relived the many highs and horrors of 2017, cheering once again for a young woman, her face full of calm and resolve, taking part in a Black Lives Matter protest; looking once again into the eyes of a young girl shot in Myanmar. Staring into these photographs reminded us of the power of art, of how we as artists can utilize our individual media to present audiences with frank, resonant depictions of the cultural crises of the day.
The contributors to this issue all hold and use this power. In her story “Not Mildred,” Brandi Wells takes the notion of a border wall and amplifies it, introducing us to a man so fearful of the external world and its dangers that he conflates safety with imprisonment, going so far as to construct a doorless wall around his home. While it is the male figure that erects the wall, it is the women—the man’s wife and daughter, each of their own generational mindset—who work together to survive it. The tale is at once outlandish and unsettlingly plausible, containing a warning reminiscent of the one Margaret Atwood attaches to The Handmaid’s Tale: “Never believe it can never happen here.”
Caroline Beimford also explores the human capacity for fear in her essay “We Who Are about to Die Salute You.” In a tone that seeks more to comprehend than to critique, she takes us deep inside “prepper” culture, introducing us to a group of camo-clad men who gather once a week to swap tips on how to survive the coming apocalypse. Exactly what it is they’re preparing for, they can’t say—the number of scenarios involving gangs, terrorists, natural disasters, and even the “antichrist system” is simply too high—but they take comfort, and pride, in their acts of preparation.
Indeed, a concern for the future permeates much of the work in this issue. In her story “We Are Trying to Understand You,” Joy Baglio imagines a stark endgame to our infatuation with artificial intelligence, while Kristen Arnett’s “Suggestible Hauntings” examines a culture so willing to pay for the next thrill that the act of playing ghost becomes a lucrative profession. An enthralling video essay by Kathleen Kelley and Sarah Rose Nordgren offers a visual representation of these concerns. Blending elements of the natural with the artificial, it sets a miniaturized woman down inside a manufactured world and asks us to consider: which one stands in control of the other?
New poetry from Daniel Borzuztsky offers a harsh and unfamiliar view of Chicago’s famous lakeshore, challenging readers to “[c]ome, watch the police remove the homeless bodies from the beach”; and Tracy K. Smith finds a soul-deep connection with an elderly woman in “Charity.” “I am you,” she says, “one day out of five, / Tired, empty, hating what I carry / But afraid to lay it down . . . ”
In the current political and social climate, we all may hate what we carry. It can be tempting to fall into complacency, to simply look away. Thankfully, we have the power of art to challenge and remind, and to stir us to action. We hope you’ll spend some time with this beautiful and important work, and we invite you to pass it on to others.
Carrie Muehle
Managing Editor
Managing Editor: Carrie Muehle
Assistant Managing Editor: Aram Mrjoian
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Film Editor: Sarah Minor
Fiction Editors: Aram Mrjoian, Noelle Havens-Afolabi, Marina Mularz, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editor: Molly Sprayregen
Poetry Editor: Dane Hamann
Social Media Editor: Aram Mrjoian, Ankur Thakkar
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Alex Miner, Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson
Staff: Adam Lizakowski, Ahsan Awan, Andrea Garcia, Anne-Marie Akin, Bonnie Etherington, Caitlin Sellnow, Caitlin Garvey, Dan Fliegel, Devin O'Shea, Ellen Hainen, Gretchen Kalwinski, Hillary Pelan, Jayme Collins, Jennifer Companik, Jonathan Jones, Joshua Bohnsack, Madina Jenks, Marssie Mencotti, Megan Sullivan, Myra Thompson, Nathan Renie, Pascale Bishop, Patrick Bernhard, Salwa Halloway, Sara Connell, Sarah Jenkins
Image from Territory
The Badlands
Say drive across the desert, and what you see
is jewel sky and white limestone crag,
the land so long you could roll and roll
into the horizon, always ahead of the same hill.
Poem with a Car Wreck
Me and my beloved at a Kieslowski
retrospective he hopes I’ll find
my passion for cinema me too
the way I find my soup ladle rocking
Father as Papercut
or wet leaves weighing down a barn
roof. As jagged sunrise softened by
a few itinerant clouds; the whole of
winter winnowed down to one hard
Detroit Animalia
The pit bull’s snarl bays the block, its neck knotted to the chain-link fence.
Jordan says we should help, that it’s not a snarl but a plea. The reddened
scars around the mane from the tug of the dog’s ideation of escape allow
for myriad tortured fantasies, but I insist we keep walking. In some parts
Amazon Prime
My best friend from high school lends me her password
so I can watch something about our dead movie star princess unavailable elsewhere.
There’s peanut brittle my friend bought, saying to me, don’t tell my husband,
A Disorder of Written Expression
I am not afraid of doctors.
Sitting in the only unoccupied chair at the allergist’s office—straight-backed and wooden, a torture device more fit for my late granny’s dining room—what I must grapple with is my fear of paperwork.
Coney Island Avenue
The morning of Al’s funeral we wake to streets, sidewalks, trees, and cars encased in a sheet
of ice one-eighth of an inch thick so that everything under our overcast sky gleams
grayly
At the Mayo Clinic I Stare at a Wall of Blue Sodalite Marble
It’s also called “wisdom
stone.” Here there are whole walls of it, shades of dark luminous
blue veined with white
Late Night Science
If reality and existence are debatable,
if I may not be here,
then maybe when I turned from the TV to watch winter
instead I really did go back to Mrs. Newsome’s sixth-grade class,
Kitchen Clock
Beware of my friend Jan’s stories,
the one about her tour of the famous church
and the hysterical child, how the mother
had to practically carry the kid out,
Fallen Angel
Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1981, acrylic and oilstick on canvas
Blue, what could be sky
unknotted—bluer even
than a lake shuffling
We Who Are About to Die Salute You
When I climb into Scott Campbell’s warm truck, it’s with gratitude and trepidation. We’re both early, and the parking lot’s cold, but I don’t know Scott all that well, and while he’s been kind in inviting me along, he’s also got a burr cut, a barbed-wire bicep tattoo and a concealed-carry permit I’ve heard him brag about.
We Are Trying to Understand You
We found the woman living under a fishing boat. Our cameras picked up her movements. We are guessing the food sources were more abundant near the beach, and she was able to survive unnoticed for some time.
The Performance
Sunlight falls like a string of fluorescent bulbs on Marlene’s neck. Sweat traces the sag of her hips as the line outside the gallery spills out onto the street. She’s sweated half of the day with half of L.A. in the space between a pharmacy and a furniture depot.
the young barbarian girl
from espèce
Translated by Nathanaël
[ Note: “The young barbarian girl” is inscribed in the “sous-sols” (undergrounds) series of poems, which refers to miners who extracted bauxite in the department of the Var, the principal deposit in France of bauxite, which was of international importance until World War I. Saint Barbara (Sainte-Barbe, in French) is said to have lived in the third century in Heliopolis (today, Baalbek in Lebanon) under the reign of the Emperor Maximian. She is the patron saint of miners. ]
the sighthound
from espèce
Translated by Nathanaël
[ Note: “The sighthound” is inscribed in the “animales” series, the title of which can be read as the feminine plural form of the noun animal or its corresponding adjective. ]
la rue des abeilles
from espèce
Translated by Nathanaël
[ Note: “la rue des abeilles” is inscribed in the “animales” series, the title of which can be read as the feminine plural form of the noun animal or its corresponding adjective. The title “la rue des abeilles,” the name of a street in the first arrondissement of Marseille, translates as “Bee Street.” ]