Issue 164
Summer & Fall 2023
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EDITOR’S NOTE
I’ve been thinking about nuclear semiotics recently.
In college, I attended a heavily-promoted John D’Agata reading, in support of his newly released About a Mountain. D’Agata spoke about Yucca Mountain, a nuclear waste repository some eighty miles outside Las Vegas. Scientists and linguists were tasked with creating a warning sign that would last as long as the nuclear waste remains radioactive, 10,000 years in the future, when it is unlikely any contemporary languages will exist. I recall the solution was to create basalt pillars, etched with Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” face, arranged in such a way that when the wind blew, it would create a D minor chord, creating an air of melancholy. These sounds and symbols worked together to provoke trepidation at an instinctual level. As a young English major with an anxiety disorder, this image made an impression on me. While fact-checking this memory, I found I synthesized multiple solutions. I misremembered information from thirteen years ago, which is nowhere close to the 10,000 needed to communicate in this example. It has left me with a question: How do we leave something for the future?
This is my last issue as managing editor of TriQuarterly. Not to mix metaphors, but I am ready to pass the torch to Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. I’ve tried to keep up the momentum set by my managing editor predecessors Aram Mrjoian and Carrie Muehle. I am proud to work with a team dedicated to publishing writing that converses with readers. We strived to create issues that recall the past, but speak to our future.
The stories in Issue 164 are ethereal, haunting, and cautioning. A young couple searches for a symbol confirming their impending marriage in Ben Loory’s “The White Bird of the Forest,” while a dead woman possesses her ex-husband in “After I Become a Ghost” by Jessie Ren Marshall. Mary Hawley’s translations of Juan Carlos Mestre’s poems read like nuanced liturgies, while Ryley O'Byrne’s video essay titled “Liturgies” forces the viewer to kneel at the altar of technology. Poet Kathleen Radigan reminds us, “rat will outlast us” in the end.
We feature a suite of prose poems in this issue by Richard Siken, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Vikram Masson, and Corey Zeller, pieces that shed form entirely. They are balanced by Sayuri Ayers’s essay on the movements of the lyric essay, harkening back to some of my favorite archival issues on craft and form like Issue 19: For Edward Dahlberg and Issue 38: In the wake of the Wake, all pushing for the acceleration of language.
In my first editor’s letter I wrote, “We can never live up to this journal’s history, but rather, are contributing to this journal’s future.” This editorial team has done just that. Whether it’s long-term nuclear waste warning messages or an easily accessible archive, there is no guarantee our message will endure, but thanks to these writers and this staff, I am fortunate to be a part of this now.
— Joshua Bohnsack
Managing Editor, TriQuarterly
MASTHEAD
Managing Editor: Joshua Bohnsack
Assistant Managing Editor: Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Northwestern Assistant Director in Creative Writing: Colin Thomas Pope
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, Vince LaGrassa, Orzu Tursunova
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 The Seafarer
In Memory of Joseph
I had coffee with Brodsky in a Janiculum bar
I didn’t know English, he didn’t speak the language of Cervantes
We could barely understand a damned word
He ordered a hard-boiled egg sandwich while reflecting
The Acolyte
All night long I’ve been reading the Oration on the Dignity of Man by Pico della Mirandola,
from which one concludes that May 14, 1486, does not exist,
that spring and youth are daughters of Marsilio Ficino,
that beauty by mythological right is wife of the tripod and the chameleon.
Inside a Greek Tragedy There's No Need
for an unlimited MetroCard
or green juice cleanse
just a chorus chanting your name
when you walk into a room
Second Time This Year
The man working on my mother’s house
is an ex-con like me.
He doesn’t say, but removes his shirt,
the heat pressing 90, &
August Lyric
Even now, summer busies itself
by dragging light up from the earth,
each flower grown shameless
in the copper fields of dusk.
this our muscled temperatures:
full of blooddrunk heat, the ember swollen with the memory of crumpled paper
its tightknit fortitude its effortless combustion to be warmed by such
these our sacred storms:
within this eternity, sky sits bluing its quiet madness its effigy of starlight
& gaseous suffocation yes as if it had anything
this our impossible savorings:
when the world spins into itself its tautness is more unruly than the axis it’s made of. more
unruly than its impossible invisible spindle. spin spin spin into something to salivate for.
something to devour. its galactic need, the ego of it. see the world turned into its
Bananera (United Fruit Company)
I’d gone there years before not meaning to stop from the capital north
to the lowlands where the small highway joins the narrow-gauge rail
that runs from the plantations to Puerto Barrios where bananas meet
the ships and flow as though on plates into their holds as Neruda wrote
Wile E. Coyote Wrote This Sonnet On His Way Down
Above, the stars are swelling and swelling
as they do. Me—I’m still just a sad song
humming its way up a throat. Paint a tunnel
on the maroonest canyon wall, run into it,
Self-Portrait as a Laboratory Dog
high holy enzyme rile my saliva
nameless stimulus splinter my sleep
merciful researchers pearl out my urges
for gossip for gristle. already in your presence
Prayer for Revenge
Lord lightning crumble the lives of wicked men to salt piles
and plastic dog-shit bags amassed in flies
Then bless the rest of us even the screaming kid
the scuttles on the subway tracks
Heart Valve
Every evening at 5:00 pm, the third wife would raise a bottle of liquor
above her head and yell Ding-dong! It was five o’clock somewhere
and somewhere was here.
Ode to the Piñata
You’re always there for me, dear piñata. Every year you greet me when I need you most. When I’m one year closer to death. You remind me to take a second and enjoy dulces.
Emerson’s House
We had trundled into Concord after a long drive from New Hampshire, and after a tour of the museum, some victuals and ale at a local tavern, and a frantic tour of Walden Pond, I went by myself to Emerson’s house while everyone else traipsed among the tombstones at Sleepy Hollow.
The Hungry
After my father fell through a loose brick in the parapet of a Rajasthan fort, the wires stopped, so I began planning my return home when my computer science professor said, Go see Exxon Singh.
Little Hells
You scrub all the checkered, tiled floors of the Catholic school on weekends to pay off suspensions. You take out the garbage while priests smoke on the balcony of the rectory next door.