A man has no clock but what his body feels. 
In beating sinews an ache builds over time. 

	A boulder ticks in time’s ache down a mountain. 
	The sun is a boulder, a clock face that burns. 

A burning clock swallows sun and man. 
Scorched to bone, a man’s heart becomes scar or star. 

	A star always burns. A scar cannot be scorched. 
	Flames twinge their clockwork through muscle and mind. 

Timepiece melts but memory ticks. Gears and springs 
amalgamate like copper into steel in 

	an alloy of truth and anguish. Through which a 
	body feels gears mesh or grind, spring wound 

or pulled by sash weights, set to a pendulum, 
body ticking like a watch despite itself. 

*Poet’s Note:

The first line is from the poem “Man on Cross” in Robert Kelly’s collection Lapis (Black Sparrow Books, 2005).

Jonathan Yungkans

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.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ 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)