Have you thought about flossing your genitals? Yes, I know the scrotum can become a concern, but proper care can brighten the appearance, not to mention the mood. This might sound formal, but I don’t want to get too personal. That’s a good way to snag poison oak between a mind’s nether regions, and who can scratch enough up there? It’s not polite. It’s not pole dancing, either, but you could conduct a survey, if it makes you feel better. All that exertion would make me dizzy. And those leotards can show everything—the whole fruit basket. Like the time I tried on a Speedo in a department store and you could tell I was certifiably kosher. If it won’t knock the wind out of your sails, by all means, knock yourself out. Canvass away! A person could pull a Tom Sawyer and have the whole neighborhood whitewash an itinerary. That fence can come in handy. “Good fences make good neighbors,” remember? Wait until the first frost in November. You’ll remember. It’ll give you a chance to practice your folding technique on brown-paper shopping bags. Just keep things simple. Save the bloodletting for later, when you have the pretty colored paper from Japan, metallic finish and all. You can polish that mirror finish to a gleam, with all due supplication. Be confident. Open those legs and smile wide. Like L’Oréal used to say in its hair-coloring ads, you’re worth it.

* Title is from the poem “Not You Again” in John Ashbery’s collection Your Name Here (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 2000).

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)