Two ravens stand alfresco with a dead rat, the rodent lying across the street median. A tableau which could appear in a fresco. Asphalt may as well be fresh plaster. Or would that be a lie? Or are rat and birds all components of a lie, or of an all-encompassing truth inherent in untruthing when there’s nothing but the truth on the ground? My pastor claimed Genesis was not the book of creation, but of recreation. This explains the almost ritualistic ambiance which hovers over the scene on that median. The corvids move their beaks like paintbrushes, each staying on its own side. A bird picks up the carcass by the hip and drops it. The other pulls at the rat’s shoulder. One waits for the other to finish before taking its turn. Together, they arrange its pose. The rodent becomes more model than meal. The scene could pass for a still life, were it not for those two keeping the subject anything but still.

* Title is from the poem “Ghost Riders of the Moon” in John Ashbery’s collection And the Stars Were Shining (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 1994).

Jonathan Yungkans

is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. He types in the wee hours of what some call morning and others some mild form of insanity while he watches a large skunk meander under the foundation of a century-old house. He is thankful when his writing is less noxious than that jittery creature on the other side of those floorboards. During what some choose to call normal hours, he works as an in-home health-care provider, fueled by copious amounts of coffee while finding time for the occasional deep breath.

His poems have appeared in Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Panoply, San Pedro Poetry Review, Synkroniciti, West Texas Literary Review, Unbroken, 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)