1.

Atop a power pole, a raven lets loose a white waterfall of guano when someone farther uphill stops and rants at my window. No idea why he started yelling. I greet this raven every morning, speak gently, happy for the regularity of its presence. Maybe it’s returning the favor. Maybe, in the corvid scheme of exterior decorating, it thinks the neighbor’s looks would improve with a lighter shade of make-up. Something between Kabuki and Killer Klown. The black bird turns toward me. Clicks and pops a message that could mean, “You’re welcome. Go enjoy your coffee. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

2.

There were 24 of them. Skeletons in graves, between 4500 and 5,000 years old. Damaged lower vertebrae. Thickened pelvic bones. Ridged femurs. Day-in, day-out price, learning how to ride horses across deep-green European grass steppes. How many hundreds of times were they thrown? How many pulled muscles? Twisted ligaments? Or, since these men rode atop the beast’s hind end, not its back, sore posteriors from harder bouncing through the day. And which was first and, at the end of the day, a pain to whom—horse to rider or rider to horse? Do bony hands across crotches suggest a toll?

3.

When will we get Watergate: The Rock Opera? Elvis Presley as special guest, offering a fried peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich in place of cottage cheese and ketchup as I Am Not a Crook in Chief’s final meal in office. Elvis saying, “You’re no hound dog, boss.” Quick scene change. Nixon dressed as Cleopatra. Centurions entering his chamber with an asp, singing, in chorus, Lennon and McCartney’s “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Tricky Dick responding with Clarence Carter, wanting to get lost in their rock-and-roll and drift away. Throwing his shoulders back. Remembering he’s a Nile queen.

4.

“He didn’t piss on top of the roof,” my neighbor told me. “He walked to the top step and let go, facing your window. Brightest yellow I’d seen.” Would’ve been better, I thought, if it had been beer, but couldn’t see our mutual friend wasting anything undrunk on me. My neighbor continued: “Asked me if I had a Glow Stick. Said he wanted to wrap it like a snake around his penis so you’d see what he was doing. Is blue still your favorite color? Just wondered. If you’ve got time, could you pick up a 12-pack of Tecate® Light?”

5.

My mom dreamed, just after my great-grandfather died, about standing in the kitchen he’d handcrafted for my great-grandmother. Gleaming white cabinetry. Some doors no bigger than a cuckoo clock. Tiny latch-handles like crosses, waiting to be turned. She turned and there he stood. Long-sleeve khaki shirt and trousers as usual. Didn’t say if he also had his hat on to go outside. Before she said anything, he put a finger to his lips and disappeared. His way of saying goodbye, she said. How many times since she passed have I wished he’d shown her how to do that with me?

* Title is from the title poem in John Ashbery’s collection A Wave (Penguin, 1985).

Poet’s Commentary

The poem is a cadralor with prose poems in place of lineated ones for each of its five sections, written to the same word-count to correspond to the lineated form’s requirement for the same number of similar-length lines. In response to the call for poems that were “silly or weird or nutty or quirky,” how much quirkier can a poem get than to include former president Richard M. Nixon in drag? If some readers wonder why I pull the rug out from under them by including a serious section at the end, it actually mirrors the theme implied by the opening one. In place of something treasured and present, there is something treasured yet absent.

Jonathan Yungkans

is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. His work has appeared in San Pedro Poetry Review, Synkroniciti, West Texas Literary Review, Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and other publications. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Prize and was published in February 2021 by Tebor Bach.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ It Belongs to Each of Us Like a Blanket by Jonathan Yungkans, Winner of “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge (Issue 15, September 2022)

⚡ Le Grand Matin by Jonathan Yungkans, a Finalist in MacQ’s Triple-Q Writing Challenge (Issue 11, January 2022)

⚡ La Porte by Yungkans in MacQ’s special Christmas Eve issue (10X, December 2021)

⚡ Two Duplex Poems, plus author’s notes on the poems and on the form, by Yungkans in Issue 10 of MacQ (October 2021)

⚡ Lawful and Proper, poem in Rise Up Review (Fall 2020)

⚡ Cadralor in the Key of F-Sharp as It Cuts into My Spine, in the inaugural issue of Gleam (Fall 2020)

⚡ I’d Love to Cook Like Hannibal Lecter [video], read by the poet at an event sponsored by Moon Tide Press (10 October 2019) celebrating the anthology Dark Ink: A Poetry Anthology Inspired by Horror

⚡ Saving the Patient, poem in The Voices Project (18 January 2018)