In arching chasms of unnerved stones, clueless outfielders 

scramble, squinting up 
a feral azure to catch their share of plate-glass vast as sails 
and sharp as any 

agenda. Why else did they invent Mercurochrome? Going 

by all the raw meat 
flung in debates, hamburger has laudable uses in cherished 
old mantras of truth, 

justice and freedom to respire daily shares of toxins, albeit 

with appropriate 
condiments and fluoridated ideology. There’s something to 
be said to let one 

spreadeagle personal dogma on strange lawns at lunchtime, 

lend the lawns’ owners 
time for their Rottweilers to masticate. How heedless, how 
profound the roses, 

deep a heart over which gardeners struggle to fertilize with 

care. St. Augustine’s 
tough grass and evangelical in view toward the sun, bullish 
and blinding. It can’t 

hurt a bit to pick a random twig, a noun to roll in faith, and 

say, “Tony, Tony, 
come around, some attitude’s lost and can’t be found.” And 
if we dig a hole 

and plant that twig, where do we grow? No sidewalk going 

cracked in defiant 
straightness toward hell’s Easter parade stays fresh. Weeds 
take advantage, pull 

to an important life choice at a stop sign, hit the gas, maybe 

or maybe not grasp 
the tar in asphalt for a brain to comprehend. Squirrels scurry 
while everyone else 

sniffs, seated in rockers and deck chairs, for quotas of ghosts. 

* Title is from the poem “Syringa” in John Ashbery’s collection Houseboat Days (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; reprint edition, 1999).

Poet’s Note

Yes, this poem is shaped like a sermon. Hawthornesque comedy? Commentary on Christian nationalism? Fair enough, either way—and we can leave it at that. The poem began as associative freewriting. Letting it become dense and perhaps seemingly overgrown was not by conscious design, but happened organically given the way my neurodivergent brain works.

Once in a while, a poem comes to me which either resists pruning or threatens to give up the ghost if tended past a minimum degree. If poems were flora, this one might qualify as bonsai, as much as I kept its narrative thrust. The structure, with its alternating single lines and triplets, doubles as an attempt to break things into manageable bits for the reader. But how much content should a writer unpack for the reader’s sake, as opposed to allowing readers to realize insights themselves and potentially relate them as a shared, interactive experience?

My overriding concern—the one upon which the poem actually ends—is that we become so blinkered by the past that what happens around us becomes a closed book. This mindset feels like the societal equivalent of an admonition my pastor gave about “becoming too heavenly-minded for earthly good.”

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 Yungkans, a Finalist in MacQ’s Triple-Q Writing Challenge (Issue 11, January 2022)

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

⚡ Two Duplex Poems, plus author’s notes on the poems and on the form, 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)