For months I was the fabric cover of a mattress, the soft yellow cloth covering an overstuffed armchair. Black walnut branch a bridge for squirrels to play on the porch roof, pointing northward in the silence I held, miser’s gold. North to sharpen a thought to needle point. Cold light streamed into the room, stopping just short of the chair. Questions hung green as the walnut’s fruit in my head. Was the crack running through me a sidewalk’s, spreading, one side rising? Was it scabbed over, pulling together as it healed? My dad told me once, before I ask, be ready for the answer. I wasn’t ready to pick that fruit. Let it hang, to drop of its own accord. I remained cloth, quilt-stitched into batting, stretched across a wooden frame.

That was years ago. This morning, my ears follow patterns in a Lowell Liebermann nocturne. Hands cross-stitch across wires stretched on a cast-iron frame. Unexpected accents and registers remind me of a mattress, a chair. The music softens in tone. Last night, the full moon was an old ice cube, hazed pure white and seeming close enough to feel roughness where its surface had once been smooth. The weight of accumulated memories in the night sky left a crick in the right side of my neck, which cracks and pops whenever I turn my head. A needle points north. The tree, long gone from the yard but rooted in my mind, offers rest.

* Title is from John Ashbery’s poem “The Lost Train” in his collection Where Shall I Wander (HarperCollins, 2005).

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)