FICTION
Pallavi Wakharkar | Simple Animal
Serkan Görkemli | Runway
Rajnesh Chakrapani | Rewards and their delivery systems
Ernesto Barbieri | Animal Shelter
Kenneth Tanemura | Every Day I Write the Book
Nikki Ervice | Rabbit
Lindsey Drager | Solastalgia
NONFICTION
Alison C. Rollins | “The Men in Chicago Are Soft” or Self-Portrait as Queer Black Bear
Lisa Argrette Ahmad | My Journey with Race: A Patriarch and His Portrait Shape Five Generations
Xujun Eberlein | Ms. Daylily
Christopher Kempf | So Many Saturdays
Michael M. Weinstein | The Blue Cane
Jonathan Wei | Why I Lie
Michaela Django Walsh | Diablas Por Siempre
POETRY
Donald Platt | Excerpts from Tender Voyeur
Sarah Heston | Boys
Alisha Dietzman | The Margin of a Floating Structure
Samyak Shertok | Today I’ll Love Nomad | HIMALAYAS DRIVER LICENSE | How to Sky-Bury Your Father Tongue | Love in a Time of Revolution | The Day the Crow Perches on the Persimmon Branch
Derek A. Denckla | la almohada | do to from | props to you
Alisha Acquaye | Saturn Returning to Mami Wata
Gunnar Wærness, translated by Gabriel Gudding | 58. (the boat / november 5 2014)
Meghan Maguire Dahn | Facing the Water | Vellum | Land Grant | River | Analgesia | Question | Self Portrait with Lacrimae Rerum and Eyelid Pulled Down | Never and Beast | Calve | Of the Hermit Bent Double by His Chains and His Follower
LETTERS
Donald Justice, edited and introduced by Jerry Harp | To John Berryman and Mark Strand
ARTWORK
b. Robert Moore | This Smile Didn’t Come Easy
Mixed media on unprimed Belgian linen wood panel box, 2021.
Editors’ Note
A Reframing
Real quick, flip to page 42. The man in this painting, William Dotson, was a slaveholder. His descendent Lisa Argrette Ahmad describes in her essay how the painting ended up in her ambivalent possession. As she has it restored, she paradoxically moves our focus away from the man and onto her branch of the family, recentering our gaze upon the young Black girl she was when she first saw the portrait.
On our cover is another painting, “This Smile Didn’t Come Easy,” by Des Moines artist b. Robert Moore. Its joy and movement a counterpoint to the heavy, ponderous image of Dotson, Moore’s work calls to mind a similar reframing as Ahmad’s essay. Paint and attention are lavished not on a man because of his race, gender, and wealth, but upon a young girl who was not previously in the dominant narrative.
At TIR, we hope to join in this movement by featuring voices that have not always been given center stage in literary magazines. This double issue includes, to give just a few examples, an ode to a drag queen, an account of growing up with a Chinese last name in small-town Minnesota, and a meditation on a cane used as a mobility aid.
In TIR’s very first issue, Winter 1970, all the poets, short story writers, critics, and those under critical scrutiny were men. Brilliant men, mind you: Donald Justice, William Stafford, Robert Coover, Galway Kinnell. From what I can gather from context and biographies, the majority, if not all, were white, cisgender, heterosexual men.
This is not to disparage the 1970s, a decade that birthed many an idealistic institution, as well as some acceptable people (kidding! self-deprecating reference); the work of examining our blind spots is perpetual. Fifty years on, or maybe even tomorrow, this 2022 issue might seem antiquated in its scope.
We end with letters from the estate of Donald Justice, edited by Jerry Harp. Justice’s poem “ABC” was first in that first issue of TIR. If you’re game for more flipping around, take a look at it on our inside back cover, newly christened our From the Archive page. To me, the poem reads like a manifesto for TIR. To launch a literary magazine in 1970 meant asserting against larger cultural forces the value of syllables, words, stanzas. Each of the diverse array of writers in this issue takes up the same cause. A, then B, then C, and building a new world from there.
—Lynne Nugent
