For issue 1.2, the folk at yolk have decided on the theme of Home. We are accepting submissions between November 15 - January 1. Send us your poetry, fiction, visual art, and non-fiction.
Home is a collection of pieces and memories, screwed and dovetailed together. It’s sanctuary and hysteria. It’s what you run from, run to. Maybe yours is brick. Maybe yours is body. Whatever it may be, go there soon, and hope for an open door.
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We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. The history and present reality of systemic racial injustice must be acknowledged and condemned. We recognize our position and responsibility to act as a vehicle for those voices committed to effecting change. We want to hear yours. Consult this article for a list of petitions, donation possibilities, educational resources, and references.
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What does it mean to be Canadian? What part does it play in our identity? These questions, alongside familial tension, guardianship, and division are brought to the forefront in Ben von Jagow’s poems.
A “sundog,” or parhelion, is defined as an “atmospheric optical phenomenon that consists of a bright spot to one or both sides of the sun”; or, as Aristotle and our narrator put it: “accidents of matter, a.k.a fuck-ups off-script.”
Here are the winners of Flash-Fried 2.0, yolk's short form poetry contest.
While weaving underground on the city’s great pulmonary track from one metro station to the next, Mathieu pauses at Papineau to capture both the stillness and the frenzied rush of being alone, together.
In part two of Labrosse's story, Oriana's two pursuits become one. Discover the space with her.
From Cartagena, Colombia, to Montreal, Canada, follow Oriana underground, as she discovers the architectural history of Montreal’s metro stations and embarks on a journey that takes her back to the 1976 Olympic games.
If the plate came back around anyway I might pinch my quarter back, or at least take some change for it, a dime and a nickel, say. That would still be a sin but less of one.
But they still had a few minutes. And so Millie mooed. Cate mooed with her. The cow stared at them.
The lights on the ceiling look like the blue cars and mimic our movements; snaking through tunnels, bending at curves, and eventually, bifurcating in opposite directions.
"Nothing really bad happened, no one got hurt, but that night I was eaten by a huge, red-eyed, big fanged, foamy-mouthed python."
Denbeigh Whitmarsh's work serves as a cultural milieu between the rural and the urban.
Yolk stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
“She would fill herself up one night at a time on the Love Train towards Place-Saint-Henri metro station. She watched herself in the window for four stops and listened to the boots tread around her heart for another.”
“Come on,” Jim said, and he held out his hand in a high-five. “I know you love the handshake.”
A familiar setting turned unfamiliar by poet Drew Coble.
A conceptual poem documenting a trip through Montreal's underground.
When asked about his series, Fabrizio said, “Being a student at Dawson College made me take the metro everyday of the week. Traveling from Cartier to Atwater became a routine for me, so much so that I found the people looked more and more like strange shapes….I think the routine transformed them into shadows.”
We're happy to present the winners of Flash-Fried, our first short form poetry contest. Crafting a poem comprised of less than 140 characters is difficult, but the poets who submitted these selected works found the formula to achieve just that.
Perhaps every city has its peculiarities, but we have our metro lines, our buskers, our pedestrians, and all those familiar faces we pass by every day in transit, or purgatory, or simply in the morning, before we take this very same line back home. Perhaps, you wrote it down and submitted it to yolk.
'Keep a prayer on your lips and a good deed in your back pocket.' He pulls a smoke without a filter from a Ziploc and bites it like a toothpick. 'Funerals,' he announces. 'Get used to ’em.'
Behind the palazzos, he went on to explain, is an interconnected series of corridors that lead to various courtyards where the real pulse of the city lives, where you find the sordid pith of St. Petersburg.
Yolk told the Montreal literary community to show up, and show up it did.
As conceptual concrete poems, these pieces balance the weightlessness of information with the weight of the material from which that information has been gathered.
Yolk began as an electric conversation around a picnic table in Saint Henri Square.
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