"To staunch a nosebleed" & "If I try to unfold my heart"

Shana Ross

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How is one expected to go about their day when the world has erupted into flames? Through the manipulation of familiar language and the questioning of higher powers, Shana Ross’s poetry presents the impossibilities with maneuvering through everyday life now that horror is the new normal.

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

To staunch a nosebleed

Gittin 69a

Yes, yes. This world is trying
to go about business as usual,

overflowing with gore.
I transcribe ancient hierarchy 

of remedy, words to the wise and the bleeding.
1. Take a bucket to silver waters,

taste what you have filled. Taste again
from the same bucket refreshed

with tainted waters. 2. Or take the root
of fodder. Rope from your bed. Paper. Saffron.

The red parts of a palm. Set them all 
on fire, each with the other, let

everything burn. Then take
some wool and spin two yarns,

soak them in vinegar, roll them in the ashes
you have made with all your burning,

the well-mixed remnants, and roll
the wool string into a shape that will fit

into your nostril. 3. Look, if you can’t
do these simpler things, one last try but

this is it. Sit in the gutter and let water pour
on you. Wait for the rain if you have to, then

wait for the rain to stop. The moment 
the water stops hitting you,

whisper loud enough
to be heard: blood, 

blood of so-and-so, child of so-and-so,
all the way back to so-and-so, cease. Cease.

Perhaps you could try demanding, in the proper
circumstances, if nothing else has done the trick.

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If I try to unfold my heart

Gittim 8

                these days it sticks like a foot of fruit tape left in a hot car I mean just thinking about god makes it hard to breathe the voice in my head whispers what are you doing and it’s usually dishes or maybe sitting and staring at an email to make sure it is not too hot and not too cold and then the voice is annoyed but polite and hisses you know what I mean and I have to force myself to suck in air I mean existentialism scares me even if death doesn’t I mean what am I supposed to be doing and am I fucking it all up. I use words like temple and holy and legacy and remember but I don’t actually know what they mean. I mean I don’t know what I mean when I lob them like they were on fire. Wicks lit and crammed into empty bottles. I mean every religion is desperate hands deciding if flames and fuel are a weapon or a way to get through the winter. Many gods including the one I inherited are ok with war but only in pleasant porridge amounts—just right, no more no less. As if there is a difference between oops I leveled Gomorrah and Watership Down levels of blood flooding tunnels as music swells for all the bright eyes. If you spill too much blood you’ll be forbidden from building a temple and there will be no walls of stone to remember you by, no containers for holiness, no stages to perform the right words in the right season in the right time with the right people all gathered and I think David was a right bastard but I don’t even go to temple any more. I just wander occasionally in the woods and try to remember to hold this world lightly and in my backyard there are lilies of the valley that the last owner of this house planted which are my favorite and so I weed them even though I hate gardening because I want the next person who lives here to be delighted when flowers come up in the spring.

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Shana Ross is a recent transplant to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty Six Territory. Qui transtulit sustinet. Her work has recently appeared in Cutbank Literary Journal, Ilanot Review, Gigantic Sequins, Identity Theory, Canthius and more. She is the winner of the 2022 Anne C. Barnhill prize and the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition. She’s been feeding the magpies in her backyard for about a year, but friendship apparently takes more time, more peanuts.

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February 15, 2022

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