Issue 155
Winter & Spring 2019
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Welcome to issue 155. Last winter, TriQuarterly launched an online issue archive that made every single story, poem, essay, and video ever published in the journal available to a worldwide audience. The project was a true labor of love, involving the scanning and indexing of thousands of printed pages dating back to our very first issue (which was released in the fall of 1958 and sold at a price of fifty cents).
Every now and then, I find myself paging through the issues in the online archive, reading decades-old works by writers like Tobias Wolff, Joyce Carol Oates, Stuart Dybek, and Grace Paley, and thinking about how these names weren’t always part of the literary canon. There was a time when these writers were considered emerging, when journals like TriQuarterly made it their mission to draw attention to their work. As the managing editor for issue 155, I’m proud to say that the work within its (digital) pages comes to us from some of the most vital voices in the literary community today. You may or may not yet recognize their names, but you’ll find their writing powerful, the content haunting, and their messages impossible to ignore. Two separate pieces address the topic of climate change, daring us to envision a future in which the commonplace becomes the stuff of legend. “Our children,” Allain Daigle predicts in his video essay “New Arctic,” “will dream about icebergs . . . strip our walls for the foundations.” And Allegra Hyde’s “Adjustments” foresees a time when we’ll tell our grandchildren stories of the days when “ice was so plentiful, people put it in their drinks just to watch it disappear.”
Ting Chang’s poem “Prophecy” also contemplates the future, its speaker seeming to call out simultaneously to a silenced mother “who used to speak,” and to an entire population of people outraged at the current political climate. “I reject walls and those who build them,” the speaker says. “I reject the safety of fear”; and, as readers, we feel ourselves becoming swept up in the “rising undercurrent,” joining in the resolve to stand up against the injustices in our world: “Say it now: The Future.”
But, of course, the future does not forge itself. As Chang notes in her poem “Patience,” and Ceridwen Hall observes in her essay “network,” the future is wrought out of the past. While “Patience” explores this notion on an individual level, with Chang listing the objects, places, and experiences she “come(s) from,” “network” examines it on a societal one. In an intricate weaving of then and now, Hall questions how far we’ve really come in communications technology while also calling attention to the lack of progress in workplace equality. In the late nineteenth century, we compressed our messages into telegrams; today, we compress them into rapid-fire texts. Back then women “earned lower wages, worked in smaller offices.” Now, here in the future, women are still fighting for equal pay.
We hope you’ll spend some time with this issue, exploring its content and contemplating the inquiries that gave rise to its works. We hope, too, that you’ll discover a new voice, a writer you’ve never read before—and that when you do, you’ll join us in spreading the word.
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: Joshua Bohnsack, Jennifer Companek, Marina Mularz, Nate Renie
Nonfiction Editor: Molly Sprayregen
Poetry Editor: Dane Hamann
Social Media Editor: Aram Mrjoian
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson
Staff:
Ahsan Awan, Patrick Bernhard, Pascale Bishop, Erika Carey, Sara Connell, Bonnie Etherington, Audrey Fierberg, Dan Fliegel, Andrea Garcia, Caitlin Garvey, Ellen Hainen, Salwa Halloway, Madina Jenks, Jonathan Jones, Erin Keogh, Jen Lawrence, Adam Lizakowski, Marssie Mencotti, Natalia Nebel, Devin O’Shea Hillary Pelan, Megan Sullivan, Myra Thompson, Molly Tyler, Katherine Williams
Image from New Arctic
Waitress in a Small Town Seaside Tavern
Maybe a surfboard hit her, you say.
Though folks whisper, her man beats her,
and there are no waves today.
Her eye is black and sealed like a shutter.
The Beasts of Battle
for Eleanor
The Eagle
Hibernal folds and fields
of blight in the blue gathering—
a sky for the taking—
a sky, that taken, yields
The Last Lock
The guard stood at the kitchen counter, breaking apart cloves of garlic. Ernesto watched as she lined them up in a straight line like soldiers. She picked up a broad knife, placed it flat over the first clove, and smashed it with her fist, crushing the innards.
Crazy English
Yun is at letter p, practicable, pragmatism, precarious… She has precariously passed her TOFEL and is now preparing for the GRE. She has a plan.
Before I Met You
1.
I climb onto the paper-lined exam table, while my mother sits in silence. It’s 3:30. The school day is over, but I’m still miserable in my gray uniform slacks and white polo. Light colors can’t hide my thick belly and rolls of fat.
A Practice of Gestures
When I was thirteen, the girl next door read my palm, taught me to cast spells;
she saw faces in things, futures in tea cups, kissed me as she cast the spell.
The first boy I loved was all lanky hands and cauliflower ears, talisman of tin.
Behind the school, skyclad, studying the speed of clouds, we kissed on the hill.
On Being Noticed
A student asks if writing is emotional
in front of his whole school and he is ten
so I try not to look too easily impressed.
California // Matter // Conspiracy
in east LA i saw a shirtless man kneel down right there on the sidewalk to pray to Allah with no prayer rug, just his half bare body, the cement and the hot sun, and his love for a god i’m not sure is really there is what helped me know which way i was traveling in a place i’ve been before but will never not be new
Simple Song #9
Boy meets Girl.
At a farmers’ market, where he sells tomatoes as large as his heart. Girl is pale, tender, and smells of spring. Of those first crocuses that poke their stubborn heads through a scarf of snow.
Guard Our Space
Side by side, Jordan and I hunch over a workbench fashioned from sturdy beams and graffitied plywood. Through the window, a gloss of daylight combs the dust.
Tell Them Everything (For CF)
Tell them everything they said. Tell them about the sick hands of some evil people or the evil hands of some sick people.
Lost in Beijing
I want to sail away on the stone boat of No Name Lake with you, away from the noise of the city beating like a heart beats against your ribs. I want to disappear into the beauty because there is nothing else to do in the face of beauty, clear like the lakes inside stars, while the wild grass strikes no deep roots, offers no beautiful flowers or leaves, yet drinks in the dew, and imbibes the flesh of the dead.
Airlifted in to Do a Poetry Gig, I Stumble over My Midwestern Roots
If you were a town like a belly button ring, stapled into the midriff
of the country, would you style yourself Fort? I’m walking in Fort
As If the Shirt Were Standing Up Straight, Hand Raised
My grandmother lights her cigarettes on the toaster’s orange electric coils,
then slaps at the smoke like she is batting at a man or a ghost or a curtain
Scared Violent Like Horses
I was too young to call him a friend, but I had a classmate once who snuck up
behind a horse and now his body is made of a long time ago.
He is the quiet space in my memory where he never sat next to me again.