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Issue 15: | Sept. 2022 |
Poem: | 787 words |
+ Footnotes: | 488 words |
1. Funny how winding sheets wrap around a brain— quodlibet of the quotidian shroud, no matter how brief a face appears, an almond peeled in its pale complexion and oval shape, quod erat demonstrandum.2 Sunglasses, outsized, suggest Dios de los Muertos— is it Quarma3 or Queen Death who’s wearing them? Louboutin heels clack as if by quartz movement, matching a little black Holly Golightly shift. Lady’s sure as Jesus on His cross to burn a Turin Shroud quandary into mind. It’s Death’s quirk to quadrate all attention, strut mortality like a runway model, garment white as cumulous clouds, billowing modishly. She turns to promenade away, watching us as quarry.4 After this, the quench of linen’s touch is quieting as the earth. Like a face at rest, eyes closed, ghosting the cloth. 2. The Shroud, whether fashion statement for a quick- change Savior or an Owen Warland device to flutter mechanically past disbelief,5 reposes butterfly-fragile under glass. Available to see by appointment only. Like the Scripture on life and death in the power of the schedule.6 The Shroud is the card from doctor or mortician, date of reckoning penciled in. Don’t quibble with the receptionist— she’ll make a quo vadis7 face, lower glasses, show moon craters in place of eyes. Quel dommage!8 Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?9 Aren’t the watchers sufficiently entertained? Shroud’s quo warranto10—writ for mankind, complete with flash-watermark, Christ as Polaroid. 3. That image—closed eyes, flowing hair, nose, beard. Answer as question. Forget how it was made. Quem quaeritis?11 Who am I really seeking, past quiescent glass—in a mirror? —to quantify eyes, ears, hairs on a head, or to qualify whose? How deep do I mourn— pun that is also a time of day? Pursue the Savior or weave myself into flax, my warp and weft? Quo jure?12 Quem quaeritis? 4. Peel-back negatives of Instamatic film reflect, glittery, in the current of a mental stream like flotsam, querling to quell quick- timing thoughts along hallways hospital-white with antiseptic lies. Can a psyche be washed in the Blood of the Lamb to rebirth it from a curse come quasi-fresh from the womb?13 “That’s a miracle, brother. You’d need Lazarus to kick that field goal, and even then the ref— complete with angel wings, striped shirt, and whistle— might call that one a foul. Faith isn’t football. You can’t play it with baseball rules.” But the Holy Land’s holiest between the third and fourth rib. Quis separabit?14 where nails pierced. Quo animo?15 an illusion of distance. Shroud’s a test page. 5. A bolt of cloth. A bolt which qualifies beams as a keel while Jesus does the Galilee Moonwalk in a quickening storm. A bolt to hold faith together in a starless, roaring sky. Maybe He was smiling when Peter said, “If it’s You, Lord, bid me come,” and bolted his way onto a walk on the wet side, a wonder, as if doing so was no quirk, quod erat faciendum.16 Would Jesus say, “It’s not Me”? 6. Fashioning a scarf joint. Tapering the ends of wood so they hold like two hands, interlocking. Questioning wood-shop wisdom on attaching lumber end-to-end and have it hold as one unbreakable beam or plank, no more than trees are one while remaining separate trunks. Yet oaks do that. Roots interweave, like quantum phone switchboard wires in old detective films, plugged in and out of the board and seemingly tangled past any casual grasp. Quo animo belying the lie of distance underground through their cores’ interlaced quiddity. The Shroud is a scarf, good as beams with ends rabbited, cut precise, pattern to pattern, to hammer until the seam doesn’t show, to lock in place. 7. I sit in a tomb quarried into a mountainside,17 quiet as a cement slab. Death clacks stiletto steps. Dawn and mockingbirds. When deep blue light shreds black— time that’s a quiet lung, collapsed, necrotic even with bird songs quivering, plenty poised between leaf and branch to twitter about, air in chests to do so. Daylight’s a quale, quashing worse than muscles and skin wasting away, bones falling loose at joints. Every morning. I picture a winding sheet, a body outlined under it like dents in a discarded soda can. A questionable outline? And is it true blood, oxidized past brick-red to ebony? Questioning makes a quadrature from what curves at sunrise back to me in the cubature of a sepulcher—mornings of hard stone walls— for which someone else died and was wrapped in flax simply out of care for me. This is enough.
Footnotes:
[Links below were accessed on 3 September 2022.]
—Winner of “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge
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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