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
A Train to Catch
The day I began turning blue, I had taken off from work and was striding briskly down Main Street when a man said to me, “Hey, baby.” He smelled like funnel cakes, and he spoke with authority. I had been taught not to talk to strangers, so I kept walking past the quiet storefronts, my neck prickling.
The Rock Is Not a Rock
I live in a one-bedroom apartment at the end of the 2/5, near Brooklyn College, on the outskirts of a neighborhood full of grand Victorian homes. Because I live within a certain radius of the college, I am considered a community member and allowed, for a small fee, an ID.
Swimming Lessons
They get to the class, Alice parking the car, the tires pressing up against piles of slushy, dirt-stained snow. Icicles are hanging from the swim building, looking threatening. Alice hates the winter.
Bearing Witness
CW: police violence, mention of blood
My neighbor is a mother of four. We become friends and watch each other’s kids in emergencies. Her oldest boys are half-Black, so she apologizes to me for all the ways she cannot raise her “big boys” with “nappy hair” because she is white.
Introduction to Video Essays
In “A Hard Gold Thread” Catherine Black uses the Abcedarian to remind us that the alphabet still feels like a logic even if seen in fragments. Throughout the video a low voice whispers: “I don’t wanna talk about it don’t talk about it I don’t wanna think about itIdon’twannatalkaboutit” as flash cards, each with a letter and a corresponding image, appear like brief lighthouse beams.
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,