Issue 166

Summer & Fall 2024

  • EDITOR’S NOTE

    Welcome to Issue 166 of TriQuarterly, curated with care by our fantastic team of readers and genre editors. The writers and multi-disciplinary artists found in this issue tackle a vast range of scopes, themes, moods, energies, forms, and approaches to language. It’s always a special challenge to come up with patterns and words that unite them all, but I think that’s an ultimately good thing. 

    This issue is expansive; it inhales and exhales. Strangeness lurks in unexpected places, taking the shape of a baby gator or a red jar or a proselytizing billboard.

    Thank you to the TriQuarterly genre editors — Patrick Bernhard, Jennifer Companik, Emily Mirengoff, Laura Joyce-Hubbard, Starr Davis, Daniel Fliegel, and Sarah Minor — and to my assistant managing editor Kira Tucker for all the work you’ve put into curating this issue, and thank you to our readers. A lot of hands touch every issue of TriQuarterly, yielding a kaleidoscope of stories.

    As always, my recommendation is to choose your own adventure when it comes to the order in which you read these pieces. Jump between genres. See what the kaleidoscope reveals.

    – Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

Image from we pilot the blood by Quenton Baker

Fiction Krista Diamond Fiction Krista Diamond

Laguna

We called it Julaugust. That bruisingly hot stretch of weeks between mid July and late August, when after a month of summer vacation, more days lay ahead somehow.

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Fiction Matt Barrett Fiction Matt Barrett

Mrs. Bird

We knew nothing about Mrs. Bird except for two small things: She didn’t believe in God and she liked to walk alone.

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Poetry Yehoshua November Poetry Yehoshua November

What About the Here and Now?

“When you die, you will meet God,”  
reads the billboard  
foregrounding the stretch of industrial factories  
off the state highway  
on my commute home each night.

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