Marriage is a house so lofty you can't hear the streets

Julie Triganne

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In an effort to make the work housed in our print issues available to a wider audience, yolk digitizes a select few pieces from each print issue. “Marriage is a house so lofty you can’t hear the streets” by Julie Triganne first appeared in the Vol. 4.2, Spring 2025 Issue.

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Yolk began as an electric conversation around a picnic table in Saint Henri Square.

Our scruffy pioneer and present prose editor had previously approached each of us with an idea, a vision: We would establish our own literary magazine in Montreal. And so it was, or so it would be. After that original encounter, eight individuals devoted to the word resolved that they would gather bi-weekly, on Sundays, and bring something new into this busy, manic world—something that might slow its spin down somewhat and cause its patronage to say: “You know what, it ain’t so bad, is it, Susan?”

We are undergraduate, graduate, and graduated students of writing. Some of us learn our craft formally from accomplished authors in seminar courses, and some of us learn by looking out the window of the world and onto the streets that sing below. Some of us learn from screaming squirrels, old curtains, departed grandfathers, and bowel movements. We learn from old lovers, long winters, imperfect mothers, and from the deep internet where a musical genius remains entombed.

Yolk is cold floors on Sabbath mornings, home-brewed ginger beer in the endless afternoon, and downpours of French-pressed coffee in assorted artisanal mugs. Our first official gathering was scheduled for a duration of two hours; most of us remained for six, departing only to attend to the summons of our own beckoning realities. Together, with time suspended, we talked endlessly of contributing something to disrupt Montreal’s literary ecosystem. Something unparalleled, something true.

But what? There was nothing to discuss. There was everything to discuss.

We volunteer our time, hounding some elusive beast composed of combustible words and works. We are hopeful, truly hopeful, that we can give something new, a new way, a new light, and that if we cannot, we might at least uphold the traditions of our predecessors, cast star-wide nets to capture their echoes. We are a thousand decisions. We are a sanctuary for the orphaned word, the solitary writer, the cereal-eating artist who yearns for company, for the comfort of a like mind; we sit together with them at foggy dawn, it rains a baptism, with our arms and hands intertwined, we form an umbrella—underneath, they scribble madly, the perfect picture.

Yolk in no way presumes to be superior to its contemporaries, but its contemporaries should not presume yolk to be anything other than loud—quite, quite loud. We are yippidy jazzed to address the oh-so-technicolorful magnificence of the human experience, but we are prepared also to address the ugliness, to stare at its wet, hairy snout and into its square depth and to roar in return at the things that yearn to devour our skin, beset our ethos, and dig graves in our own backyards.

There’s so much to say, there’s so much we don’t know, but together, with you, we can placate that ignorance, render it peaceful, tolerable, and perhaps even, fucking beautiful.

And Susan says, “Amen.”

When I changed my status to ‘engaged,’ 
my ex sent me a message at 4:30 a.m. 
I scrolled and scrolled; he brought up old pet names 
and quoted lyrics to songs I’d loved, ending with, 
I’m ready to be the man you want me to be. 

After my wedding, he sent me another message
saying he was back in treatment, Step Nine: 
do I accept his amends? This I joked about: 
Who wants amends? What about a gift card?
Marriage makes a person pompous like that. 
My husband and I got drunk at his best friend’s cottage. 
There are photos of us plunging through the woods
wearing borrowed Wellingtons, laughing. 
The first summer of our marriage his relatives kept dying.
We went to three burials. I remember dry heaving 
in a parking lot before the after-funeral lunch, 
nauseated by that behind-the-diner smell 
of grease smelting in the bin. We fought about the normal things—
he put off cutting the hedges and the city fined us, 
I couldn’t stop smoking, so I hid until I got tired
of hiding it and started smoking in public, in the worst places
too, like outside the mall, where people asked me for cigarettes,
and I could brandish my pack, to make him angry. 
It feels good to make someone angry like it feels good
to say, “I’m married.” I’ve even whitened my teeth 
in that wifely manner. Two more former friends messaged 
me amends. One linked to her recovery blog 
in which she wrote about how she’d hoarded trash 
when she was using, infesting her apartment 
with earwigs, but she got married, moved to B.C.,
had a daughter, and now, years later, she invites me
to follow her family homestead Facebook page.
Marriage—the prettiest of loopholes. 

Julie Triganne is a poet from Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), completing her MA in Creative Writing at Concordia University. Julie’s work has been featured in carte blanche and Headlight Anthology.

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Yolk acknowledges that our work in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal takes place on the unceded Indigenous lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka/Mohawk Nation. Kanien’kehá:ka is known as a gathering place for many First Nations, and we recognize the Kanien’kehá:ka as custodians of the lands on which we gather.