Machines

Irena Datcu-Romano

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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! “Machines” by Irena Datcu-Romano first appeared in the Vol. 4.1, Summer 2024 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.”

I took trains from Bucharest to my grandfather's hometown, where houses are made of chicken feathers, banged-together tin roofs. Gold clocks clanged at Gara du Nord; pretzel machines smoked blue. Here, I stared at whipped-cream sunlight piling on station floor. Here, I remembered my mother had life before me. Train tracks snaked into gravel countryside flat and dusty as heaven. When I was fourteen, there were carpet beetles in my room. I’d take them, one by one, on a napkin and crush their backs with a key. I’d hear it—no more than snapped pencil lead—throw the inked tissue away. This was life—it was June, sun chewing my forehead, my self-hatred bright and singular as a lime. Later that summer, I was in Romania for the first time, sitting across the bar from my cousin, sticky with tequila glasses. He told me he performed throat surgery on a boy who died days later eating a sharp piece of salami. My brother sat beside me, said to him, you’re a mechanic, but you fix human pipes. I cranked three shots at the bar mechanically. Kill? I’m not killing anything. Green beer cooler light pasted my cheeks like blood.

Irena Datcu-Romano (she/her) is an artist of Romanian descent studying Religions & Cultures and Writing at the University of Victoria. She was raised on the unceded territories of the sq̓əc̓iy̓aɁɬ təməxʷ, kʷikʷəƛ̓əm, S’ólh Téméxw, Semiahmoo, sc̓əwaθenaɁɬ təməxʷ, and Stz’minus First Nations. Her poetry has been published in Work in Progress Mag and VOICES/VOIX Poetry Journal. Her poetry zine, Chess Game, was shortlisted for Broken Pencil's CanZine Awards in 2021. She serves as a Poetry Editor for This Side of West magazine.

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