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Train of Thought with Red-Eye and Wild Horses
Mark MacAllister

The seatback screen reads 12:45AM
Salt Lake City an hour back
thirty-nine thousand feet 500 miles per hour
eighty below zero outside the paper-thin hull

my dad was a numbers guy too
after each chemo session
he would call to share his platelet count
which while indeed had declined
was not as bad as expected

surely in the desert below there’s a slot canyon
creek iced over wild horses arranged
and sleeping on their feet

given a week in the woods
the fall after he died
I re-convinced myself
that the body is more
than the measure in milligrams per liter
of some poison
that I could disinherit myself
of the bleak data gathered around him
like husk

all this as I look across the aisle
my daughter dogears a book
pulls off her glasses
rubs the tear-duct corners
of her eyes
then reaches up to extinguish the reading light

—
Mark MacAllister grew up in northern Illinois, spent a great deal of formative time on his grandparents’ dairy farm in southwest Wisconsin’s Driftless region, and learned to write at Oberlin College. Mark now live in Pittsboro, North Carolina but travels to the Wisconsin Northwoods and to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to hike and bike the backcountry.

His poems appear in various journals, including Steam Ticket, Quiet Diamonds, The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry, Moss Piglet, Flying South, and Passager Journal. Mark’s chapbook, Quiet Men and Their Coyotes, won the 2022 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest and was published in January 2023.

Mark’s professional career has focused on the conservation of wildlands and wildlife; he is also an active member of his community’s emergency response team, of a red wolf conservation organization, and of a Wisconsin-based writer’s cooperative.

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