Chicago is inhospitable in winter and is no place for the impoverished and aged. This was such a place, a warehouse for those without recourse, a prison for innocent elders with no grandchildren to rescue them, or more tragically, grandchildren who actively declined to do so.

i.

I tried to find a distant cousin named Carla in photographs and again in Auntie Mack’s voice and again in Ma’s wrinkles while watching TV. The last time she was found was by the police on the train tracks.

queer (adj.) 1500: strange, peculiar, eccentric, oblique,
off-center, oblique, from PIE root *terkw- to twist.
related: queerly.

At twenty-one, I wrote the first draft of a personal essay, “On Blackening the Queer.”

One of the Girls Who Lived/collective noun/a girl who is alive, who has stayed alive, but who has not done much living.

One of Those Girls Who Lived/collective noun/a girl who has lived for a short time, or for a long time, who has done a considerable amount of living.

We’d been forgotten so long, we’d become accustomed to feeling secluded. Jeffery Manor felt like living on the kind of suburban cul-de-sac where identical homes seem to pop out of boxes assembled, but it resisted such cold evenness with its homes of varying styles…

This isn't the Black issue of TriQuarterly. Instead, it is the beginning of an intentional practice by the editorial staff to represent myriad aesthetics from Black literary voices.