Issue 163

Winter & Spring 2023

  • 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

Poetry Michael Bazzett Poetry Michael Bazzett

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.

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Poetry Gabrielle Grace Hogan Poetry Gabrielle Grace Hogan

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

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Poetry Claire Wahmanholm Poetry Claire Wahmanholm

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,

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Poetry Claire Wahmanholm Poetry Claire Wahmanholm

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

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Poetry Claire Wahmanholm Poetry Claire Wahmanholm

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;

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Poetry Raphael Jenkins Poetry Raphael Jenkins

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.

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Poetry Triin Paja Poetry Triin Paja

Entering

I read how candles made from human fat

glow brightest, how everything

can be seen in that light,

hunger, you.

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Poetry Doug Ramspeck Poetry Doug Ramspeck

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

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Poetry Lisa Beech Hartz Poetry Lisa Beech Hartz

Field Guide

My mother called again today.
Where did I live? she said.

I reminded her she used to live
in Clearwater. Belleview Biltmore.

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Poetry James Harris Poetry James Harris

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

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Poetry Cindy King Poetry Cindy King

Corpus

When you finish burning, what’s left

sends a black thread of smoke

through fresh ash like a hand

waving the last of us away.

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Poetry Michael Bazzett Poetry Michael Bazzett

It Became a Time

It became a time when song no longer soared

but climbed, hand over hand up a taut rope.

One cracked voice was all it took. Cathedrals

bombed and gone, carcasses opened to the sun,

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