Rewind

Steffan Triplett

When two men kissed there used to be danger.

On television where there there once was danger, there is now vibrant color.

Color bursts & vibrates on screen, even if no one is there to see it.

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?

I am watching two kids encounter each other with pure admiration.

Television shows me alternate pasts in technicolor.

Glimpses of the past will make you imagine safety where there isn’t any.

Tense is a lie, what is your present is someone else’s future.

A show I adore made me feel like we were living in a warm, pleasant future:

Two high  school boys go on a date & their parents know.

A boy I adore takes me back to my adolescent past.

Most days I can distinguish between my own experience & a character’s.

Some days my own adolescence feels as if it were extinguished.

A me I loved’s past is disappeared, so I fill it with my guts.

I am watching two boys kiss on screen & for once there is no secondhand shame.

There are flames there. Right here there are burning flames.

What Keeps Us

Poems to Read in Community

Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Steffan Triplett’s “Rewind” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself. 

Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers hereRead poems by selecting below.

What Keeps

Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep

Read >

This Era

Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.

Read >

Talisman

each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather,

Read >

Rewind

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other

Read >

Rationale

Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.

Read >

Pupusas

no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth

Read >

Psalm III

in what language should I speak to you, sun
so you’ll rise tomorrow for my child, so you’ll
rise and stimulate the growth of our food,

Read >

Night Song

You’ll never know
what became of me
in the dark, how
my body opened,

Read >

Handfuls

Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness

Read >

Eurydice

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.)

Read >

December

Instead of snow, a dark pouring rain
to dodge as passersby reject us.  No spruces, but sycamores with their white cankers.

Read >

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An image of the poet, Steffan Triplett. A young man with long hair and medium dark skin.

Steffan Triplett is the author of the forthcoming hybrid memoir Bad Forecast (Essay Press, September 2024) and the essay chapbook Constraints (New Michigan Press, 2024). His essays and nonfiction appear in The Iowa ReviewFence, Lit HubVulture, and Electric Literature, and have most recently been anthologized in It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press, 2022). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in FoglifterColumbia JournalThe Shade JournalPuerto Del Sol Black Voices Series, and Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat, 2018). He is the Managing Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) and a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Triplett has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Outpost, Lambda Literary, and the National Book Critics Circle.

Winter 2024

Tyger Quarterly is a quarterly publication of poetry and occasional interviews. We like poetry, poems, poetics, and, most of all, poets.

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