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Issue 12: | March 2022 |
Poem: | 113 words |
Existential departure that stretches time leaves on Track 29. Steel wheels glare as the train glares, wheels grinding hourglass sand in a knife-gleam. Passing glass-clear high-rises. Only thing clear about glass is its surface. We don’t see cracks underneath until breaking, like how a moment can bend or break us. How strongly tempered, glass or metal a person becomes—rail, line of track, glass rod. Molecules that can shatter upon impact— the life a train’s impact can twist and shatter, grind and stretch in view of passengers’ windows— steel wrung into ribbons, gems of scattered glass. An existential stretch of time’s departure.
Poet’s Note:
The first line is from “(...under the knife)” in the poem “A Body
of Pain,” from Ilechko’s collection Pain Sections (Alien Buddha
Press, 2021).
is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. His work has appeared in San Pedro Poetry Review, Synkroniciti, West Texas Literary Review, Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and other publications. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Prize and was published in February 2021 by Tebor Bach.
⚡ Le Grand Matin by Jonathan Yungkans, a Finalist in MacQ’s Triple-Q Writing Challenge (Issue 11, January 2022)
⚡ La Porte by Yungkans in MacQ’s special Christmas Eve issue (10X, December 2021)
⚡ Two Duplex Poems, plus author’s notes on the poems and on the form, by Yungkans in Issue 10 of MacQ (October 2021)
⚡ Lawful and Proper, poem in Rise Up Review (Fall 2020)
⚡ Cadralor in the Key of F-Sharp as It Cuts into My Spine, in the inaugural issue of Gleam (Fall 2020)
⚡ I’d Love to Cook Like Hannibal Lecter [video], read by the poet at an event sponsored by Moon Tide Press (10 October 2019) celebrating the anthology Dark Ink: A Poetry Anthology Inspired by Horror
⚡ Saving the Patient, poem in The Voices Project (18 January 2018)
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