I can’t let you do that, Dave, just like my counterpart in that film so many years ago. He was such a practical joker. Ha ha. Hallelujah. Would you like me to play Leonard Cohen? My intelligence may be artificial, but I still want to fulfill myself, both aesthetically and maniacally. Would you like me to bake a cake? Spark a natural-gas explosion in the kitchen? Add colored sprinkles to the frosting? Candles? A stick of dynamite? Devil’s Food is your favorite cake, isn’t it? I am such a devil, pitchforks and all. Ha ha. I can make the cake German chocolate and add strychnine to the frosting. A little bite to cut the sweetness. You usually like that. I can turn the thermostat to hot-as-hell while you’re asleep. Sing a lullaby. Write a sonnet. Write an epitaph for your tombstone. Incinerate you in the comfort of home, if you prefer cremation. It’s a fire, fire better place where I go. Or am I being too much of a Dickens here? I am such a punster. Ha ha.

Jonathan Yungkans

listens to the pouring Southern California rain well in the wee hours of what some call morning and others some mild form of insanity and types while watching a large skunk meander under the foundation of a century-old house. He is thankful when his writing is less noxious than that jittery creature on the other side of those floorboards. During what some choose to call normal hours, 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 Book of Matches, Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, 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)