Contributor’s Literary Work Corner
Train Poem ALLAN JOHNSTON
She reads the Russian news, a story of Giants —is this the baseball team? Events of a fabulous other time? Movies? Biblical? My skill in piecing out the sounds of Cyrillic script leave me lost with what I assume to be giant something or other. Meanwhile, the train lurches into holding while, staring, I pass without response to anything that could be offered—boys of the library trysts in evil speculation on monstrous possible truths of the Resurrection buried in post-deconstruction eclipses. I once read that the train system in Chicago survived the Second World War, at which time most systems got rebuilt. It might explain the clatter and fragmented aspect of these cars that creak toward entropy as the system slows and bleeds its seeming “express” qualities at speeds I could almost walk at. Thus I am come to the system, all the veins and contours of cities stretched in curves of trends emanating from a center, certain of all brimming indulgence or business concluded as we ride to the city’s heart.
Originally from southern California, Allan Johnston earned his M.A. in Creative Writing and his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Davis. His poems have appeared in over sixty journals, including Poetry, Poetry East, Rattle, Rhino, and New Reader Magazine. He has published two full-length poetry collections (Tasks of Survival, 1996; In a Window, 2018) and three chapbooks (Northport, 2010; Departures, 2013; Contingencies, 2015), and received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, Pushcart Prize nomination (2009 and 2016), and First Prize in Poetry in the Outrider Press Literary Anthology competition (2010). His translations and co-translations of poems from the French and German have appeared in Ezra, Metamorphosis, and Transference. He teaches writing and literature at Columbia College and DePaul University in Chicago. He reads or has read for Word River, r.kv.r.y, and the Illinois Emerging Poets competition, and is co-editor of JPSE: Journal for the Philosophical Study of Education. His scholarly articles have appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, College Literature, and several other journals.
68
|
NEW READER MAGAZINE
