My neighbor screeches and wails over the phone. I’ve watched him slam his head in a flash of temper against a kitchen doorjamb and wondered afterwards why there wasn’t blood running down high-gloss white paint. His body is falling apart, green moss on the wet ground in my back yard, browning. I should be thankful that, unlike him, I can see through both my eyes, my testicles aren’t large as grapefruit from water build-up, my kidneys still filter caffeine and other chemicals out of my body. But my brain has its own built-in toxins, defective chemical receptors from before I was born. He rages. I hide, not just from him but so no one sees me raging when I can imagine the pine trees lining the street explode into flame just by being in proximity to me. Some of the other neighbors must hear the blasts. It’s like the line in Coleridge about water. Stigma, stigma everywhere, and all their smiles are tight, wondering when the next storm will hit. Better to stay cumulous, fluffy and distant, in our shared corner of the sky. There is something to be said for breathing, taking in sunlight, even if I’m incapable of photosynthesis and the morning feels empty, stuck in place, under a sky with the look and feel of fresh concrete. I’m just doing a Bobby Fisher. Thinking three steps ahead and wondering where my mind will skip or trip next, not out of some deep, dark portent but just because it does. Sometimes gratefulness is subtle as the next breeze, faint as it might seem. The clouds do move and the sun peeks through them from time to time. Promise. I’m just not always the best at showing it.

* Title is from “37 Haiku” in John Ashbery’s collection A Wave (Carcanet, 1984).

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)