Something You Give Back After Keeping It for a While?
Jonathan Yungkans
Sunlight. The Master stainless-steel padlock pinning a midnight-blue steel bar across cornflower-blue wooden doors—a bar weeping streams of rust, mourning what it keeps in darkness. The last breath I inhaled. A painted snake’s scarlet face, staring me down as it peels amid a weathered mosaic of navy blue, corn yellow, bronze. A late-afternoon zephyr crossing my back porch. The wail I kept inside myself when Mom died, because my sister-in-law was gone and my wife said she couldn’t take any more grief. The crackle of fig tree leaves rustling.
Author note: The title is taken from the poem “Something It Wasn’t” by John Ashbery, in the collection Planisphere.
Jonathan Yungkans is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer whose blood type is likely French roast of possibly, by this time, Starbucks House Blend. He works as an in-home health-care provider, which allows time for creative efforts and perspective to maintain what some might call rationality and others something closer to walking on water that is not frozen. His work has appeared in Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Panoply, Synkroniciti and other publications. His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer, was published by Tebot Bach in 2021.