“You look like you’ve been in a fight,” 
my wife says 
when the bandages come off 
the day 
after the doctor 
removed some skin cancers from my face 

my doctor called them “barnacles of old age” 

and it looks 
like someone caught me good with a right hook 
just below my left eye 
blood red 
smarting worse than the others combined 

doctor said he couldn’t remove all of that one 

I tell my wife about my great-grandfather 
diagnosed with skin cancer 
he used a pocket knife 
to remove a tumor on his hand 
dousing the carved-out area 
with Campho-Phenique® 

she looks me straight in the eye 

he pronounced himself 
cured over lunch 
when we were together on a construction job 
showing me his hand 
as he changed the bandage 

he died of skin cancer years later 

my wife the retired LVN 
applies Neosporin® with Q-tips® 
to smaller areas of my face 
lets the larger one 
breathe one more day before she treats it 

she tells me, “It’s not that bad.” 

*Title is a micro-poem by Maya Daneva first published in NOON: journal of the short poem (Issue 26, September 2024); appears here with Daneva’s permission.

Maya Daneva

was born in Bulgaria and lives and works in The Netherlands. She holds a PhD in computer science and is an associate professor in a Dutch university. A member of the British Haiku Society, she serves as editor of its newsletter, The Brief. She is also a member of the Haiku Society of America, the Deutsche Haiku-Gesellschaft, and the Bulgarian Haiku Union.

Her work has appeared in Akitsu Quarterly [US], Blithe Spirit [UK], Chrysanthemum [Austria], Frogpond Journal [US], Haiku heute [Germany], hedgerow [UK], jar of rain: The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2020 [US], Lothlorien Poetry Journal [US], The Mainichi Haiku in English [Japan], Presence [UK], Sommergras [Germany], tiny words [US], tsuri-dōrō [US], and many other publications.

Daneva has won prizes in the Yamadera Bashō Memorial Museum Haiku Contest (2020); the Mainichi Haiku Contest (2021); the Ito en Oi Ocha Shinhaiku Contest (2022); the Kusamakura Haiku Competition and the Maya Lyubenova Contest (2023); and the Haiku International Association Haiku Contest (2024). She has appeared on the list of the European Top 100 Most Creative Haiku Authors five years in a row: 2020–2024.

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

⚡ And All Our Wasted Time Sinks into the Sea and Is Swallowed Up Without a Trace, ekphrastic prose poem by Jonathan Yungkans, after Symphony of Night by Leon Lundmark, in Issue 26 of MacQueen’s Quinterly, aka MacQ (January 2025)

⚡ Only a Poodle Separates This Life From the Next, a prose poem by Yungkans in MacQ-20 (September 2023); nominated for the anthology Best Small Fictions 2023

⚡ A Quartet of Prose Poems: “Answering Neruda” 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 MacQ-15 (September 2022)

⚡ Le fils de l’homme, ekphrastic poem in MacQ-11 (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 MacQ-10 (October 2021)