Issue 163
Winter & Spring 2023
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Readers, welcome to Issue 163 of TriQuarterly.
In the last couple of months, I’ve started practicing yoga. I put off cross-training the last few years, irrationally assuming it would inhibit my main focus, which is long-distance running. During bitter Chicago winters, it’s a challenge to get outside for a run, so I finally opened myself to a new activity. My yoga studio is a corporate chain where the instructors play repetitive beats over the PA system throughout each class. It’s not innovative by any means, but to me it is a revelation: it’s dedicated time to myself that I didn’t know that I needed. Other than my personal goals, there’s no competition for me in running or yoga, so why not find the benefit in doing both?
TriQuarterly was originally published three times yearly. It’s now published semiannually. Systems have to change if they’re going to work. Whitman’s often-quoted “I contain multitudes” holds some universal truth when it comes to creation. We can’t limit art to a single identity.
In the stories featured in Issue 163, people turn blue and talk to their wounds. A cult member negotiates the “real world”; another narrator provides instructions for handling a spouse turned imposter. Many of the writers featured in this issue are working in multiple mediums. Julia Specht, whose story “Sunlight” brings readers along on an arctic journey, often writes for film and the stage. In her essay “Bearing Witness,” DW McKinney incorporates logic charts regarding the function of air. Catherine Black de- and re-constructs part of her 2011 book, A Hard Gold Thread, as a video essay.
Like Black, Lisa Huffaker is reconstructing a text, into not another medium, but a different work. In creating a poem out of an existing text, Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, Huffaker is both reproducing and transcending—repurposing—the original source text. While formatting the poems foo TriQuarterly, I asked Huffaker to create alt-text to make her work accessible to those using screen readers. Huffaker considered the source material and her intent creating these erasures in order to make the plain text within the images. By organizing the poem to, “The Eye is First of all, the means/by which a person sees/and only Secondly, the most/beautiful thing there Is,” Huffaker is making layers of art from art.
We have selected pieces that are ever-changing. I hope the writing in this issue stays with you and continues to evolve in your recollection.
— Joshua Bohnsack
Managing Editor: Joshua Bohnsack
Assistant Managing Editor: Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Social Media Editor: Emily Mirengoff
Film Editor: Sarah Minor
Fiction Editors: Patrick Bernhard, Jennifer Companik, Laura Joyce-Hubbard, Emily Mirengoff, Mariah Rigg
Nonfiction Editor: Starr Davis
Poetry Editor: Daniel Fliegel
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Technology Director: Ken Panko
Technical Advisors: Rodolfo Vieira, Natalie Roman, Garrett Gassensmith
Staff: Ally Ang, Amanda Dee, Amanda Vitale, Ashton Carlile, Becky Payne, Christopher Lombardom Corey Miller, Dane Hamann, Ellen Hainen, Emma Fuchs, Erika Carey, George Abraham, Gillian Barth, Holly Stovall, Ivis Whitright, Jackson McGrath, Jameka Williams, Jeremy Wilson, Jonathan Jones, Katana Smith, Kathryn O'Day, Liz Howey, Lydia Abedeen, Marcella Mencotti, Marissa Higgins, May Dugas, Megan Sullivan, Michaela Ritz, Michele Popadich, Morgan Eklund, Nimra Chohan, Puck Orabel, Rebecca van Laer, Salwa Halloway, Surya Milner, Susan Lerner, Suzanne Scanlon
Image from Ironing Pillowcases
Out in the Fields
I was out in the fields when I saw them,
their skin a ghostly white underscored with gray,
their hair too long and swept across their faces.
They looked as if they’d lived in caves for years.
The Man on the Roadside
looked at me, cocked
two fingers like a pistol,
gently pressed them into my sternum
and said:
How Do We Name This
Like a bird fills a tree, then empties it, glass
of sweet green water, light comes from the dark
pockets the birds make
—If instead I could worship
You Will Miss Most Things
How much more will I sow and never eat?
goes the idiot’s question. Which merits
an idiot’s answer: how much time is there
in the universe? You will miss most things,
The Field Is Hot and Hotter
To float on something she has never seen,
my daughter will need her teeth, which she did
not get from me. Her liver, yes. Her death
also. Her breath, no. To float, she will not
Sounds Like Rain
a thousand large wings; the tickings and tocks
of a thousand small clocks; fifty sprung springs
on the dark dark sidewalk; sometimes, I say,
it’s like padlocks tsking around their keys;
I Don't Speak Flower
There have been times—
not so many—but a
time,
when I told my therapist
High Times
Inflation made buzz-chasing a group effort, & so we’d throw in our fives
til’ they added up to an offer worth the weedman’s crosstown trek.
Split & gut-dump cigarillos preparing for the arrival of our cologne.
Our blood-shot slits. Our giggle fits we were too man to call giggle fits.
Epistemology
When the boy who used to place me repeatedly in headlock
on the school bus then punch me with his free hand died
last fall, his obituary listed the names of his children
and grandchildren, an almost-biblically impressive collection
Field Guide
My mother called again today.
Where did I live? she said.
I reminded her she used to live
in Clearwater. Belleview Biltmore.
I Wish I Could Tell My Father
I’ve solved the problem
with his Pork Chops Foyot.
That you can do chicken,
you just have to slice the fillets
The Childless Man Dreams of His Daughter: Bereft
At what age could you hold a glass of milk
in two hands? In one? I never get to see that,
let alone remember it. In this life, I never even
glimpse you, Daughter. In this world, I am
Glim of Empire—International Concourse SFO
The Pennsylvania snot otter, endangered, leads the news crawl,
trends above POTUS, also endangered, while Mike Kappel,
self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur, hawks Patriot Software.
U S A … U S A … U S A …
I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
—Cole Porter & Robert Fletcher, 1934
Each Tree Loves One Cloud
but sometimes waits for years
to see it pass overhead
maybe it coasts
elegant as a white boat
Instructions for Meeting the Man Pretending to Be Your Husband
You will forget everything we talked about when you sit down to speak with him. You will want to meet with him somewhere safe. Somewhere public. A park. A cafe. Remember, this is wrong.
Cigarettes for the Governor
Breakfast did not taste normal, so I went to Gilcren, questioning.
He cracked me on the face and said there were ants in the cereal, which was of course my fault. I had, years ago, dislearned, which made me always to blame for trouble of this kind.