It was a chihuahua, not a poodle. Tucked in one arm of the guy next to me in the supermarket check-out line. Half-gallon bottle of Hornitos silver tequila in the other arm. Dementia tipped my mom, a bottle, upside down. Emptied her. Washed away what residue of me was left inside. She’d raised collies and Shetland sheepdogs professionally. Dog shows, puppies, and more dog shows. Like the show on TV at a Mexican restaurant while I waited for take-out. A border collie on a thin leash was strutted across the ring’s neon-bright fluorescent blue carpet for judge and camera. A couple of dogs later, a Sheltie. I shattered. Tears, condensation caught in an empty bottle, started to run. Seeing the guy at the market was like watching that show. Like watching a YouTube video of a bald eagle, sailing proud and majestic just above a forest, a poodle in its talons. The dog’s white, fluffy body rocked like a bottle, carried by the neck. The eagle turned. Black wings grew smaller, receding from sight.

* Title is from the poem “Added Poignancy” in John Ashbery’s collection Wakefulness (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 1998).

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)