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| Issue 20: | 15 Sept. 2023 |
| Prose Poem: | 184 words |
By Jonathan Yungkans
But Anyone Engaged in the Business of Swapping
Purity for Depth Will Understand What I Mean*
A crow flaps in circles between here and a tall pine tree, laughing continually. It sometimes does this several times in a row without stop, flying lap after lap. I have never known a bird to fly and laugh at the same time. I have a hard time laughing.
The crow perches atop the pine, still laughing. The weight of human experience in the color of that plumage is the water pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Maybe it laughs so it is able to fly at all. Sometimes I feel too weighed down to go out.The crow has done this almost every day for several months. Sometimes it skips a day. I wonder, in the noiselessness left by its absence, if it has dived into a tree or the ground. If maybe it has flown past too frequently, and I have rubbed off on it.
* Title is from the prose poem “The Ice Storm” in John Ashbery’s collection April Galleons (The Viking Press, 1987).
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
⚡ A Quartet of Prose Poems: “Answering Neruda” by Jonathan Yungkans in Issue 17 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (29 January 2023)
⚡ It Belongs to Each of Us Like a Blanket, Winner of “The Question of Questions” Ekphrastic Writing Challenge, in Issue 15 of MacQ (September 2022)
⚡ Le fils de l’homme, ekphrastic poem by Yungkans in Issue 11 of MacQ (January 2022); nominated for the anthology Best Spiritual Literature 2023
⚡ La Porte, ekphrastic poem in MacQ’s special Christmas Eve issue (10X, December 2021)
⚡ Two Duplex Poems, plus commentary by Yungkans 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 by Yungkans in the inaugural issue of Gleam (Fall 2020)
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