A steel door. Faded barn red—a hue created from rust and linseed oil—or the greyish pink of a heart without blood, at garden’s edge. Paint flaking, blistered. Behind a diamond-pattern metal screen, maroon stained glass. I could imagine hinges’ whine. Secrets in boxes thick with dust, alongside shovels, rakes, sacks of fertilizer and mulch. Matters of heart. The garden was well-tended but I felt overgrown with weeds and thorns. I looked at the shed and wondered how many misunderstandings could be packed inside it, behind a door which had bled its share and taken on that of others, as well.

This door echoed one I’d seen at Mission San Juan Capistrano. Weathered whorls of wood grain stood out, a fingerprint. Carved wavy lines denoted cresting waves, wind gusts which might pour if the door were opened. Matters, again, of heart. Wrought traceries in the shape of hearts surrounded the lock. A solid, heart-shaped plate formed the lock itself. A long, thin sword formed a latch-handle. I could imagine this latch imbued with magic to hold back a storm. Wished it could have done so for my heart, to keep back gales that escaped from it. The blacksmith who forged it perhaps reminded by friar or conscience of the tongue as a twin-edged blade. Maybe, if I looked in a mirror, I might recognize him.

There was another doorway at Capistrano, one which appeared as deceptively open as the first was resolutely closed. Or maybe it was open and I imagined it shut and locked. An archway with a slender wrought-iron gate. Led to a garden reserved for friars to bare their hearts for private prayer and meditation. Between two rows of junipers, a large stone pool with a chalice-shaped fountain. Water burbled, gleaming white from the fountain’s top. The whole area glowed, backlit by the rising sun, fresh and shadowless. If I were left only one portal to walk through before I died, it might be this one.

* Title is from John Ashbery’s poem “Litany” in his collection As We Know (Viking Press, 1979).

Jonathan Yungkans

is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. He listens to the pouring Southern California rain well before dawn and types while watching a large skunk meander under the foundation of a century-old house. During the day, 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 Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Panoply, San Pedro Poetry Review, Synkroniciti, Unbroken Journal, West Texas Literary Review, 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

⚡ Only a Poodle Separates This Life From the Next, a prose poem by Jonathan Yungkans in Issue 20 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (15 September 2023); nominated for the anthology Best Small Fictions 2023

⚡ A Quartet of Prose Poems: “Answering Neruda” by Yungkans in Issue 17 of MacQ (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

⚡ Two Duplex Poems, plus commentary by Yungkans on the poems and on the form, in Issue 10 of MacQ (October 2021)

⚡ Cadralor in the Key of F-Sharp as It Cuts into My Spine by Yungkans in the inaugural issue of Gleam (Fall 2020)