Jonathan Yungkans
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Can You Name the Colours of a Black Hole?
1. brume Pearlescent dawn. Brain’s fogged in, reminding me of a small airport I’d pass early mornings heading for my great-grandmother. Limp white-and-red wind sock near chain-link at boundary. Cessnas, Beechcrafts parked along the single runway, white and white. Different numbers and coloured stripes along fuselages the only way to tell some from others. Ocean crashes along the other side of black, wet asphalt. Salt air cold, damp. Wind whistles. Open window. Turquoise leather and white patterned-fabric seat. Cement and rebar sky. 2. smaragdine Jade is envy set to stone, cracking and pulverizing bone. Glitters, polished and wet, while a person drowns. Waves stretch and wake in this color a few seconds, throw themselves onto shore. Sun, seeing right through their excuses, hesitates to pull them back. Claims moon was responsible. Claims this is why self-harm is lunacy. Slipping back into dizziness. Falling again through black, an oversaturation of emerald, every night. Howling while feeling every ounce of crashing. Granite’s hardness, sandstone’s gritty brittleness. 3. epigenetic Sounds like “epidemic.” I prepared meals for a neighbour quarantined for Covid. Left them on his doorstep, rang the bell, got well gone before he opened the door. “The expression of genetic information.” Watch people run when words flare, yellow and scarlet. “Modified on a molecular level.” My pastor warned creditors would sell us molecule by molecule, if they could. Repay society. Like a wood plane on a beam or sawing to size. Change those neurodivergent atoms. Make them fit. 4. rubricate Eternity is 35 percent red, 35 percent green, one percent doubt to throw the planet off-balance and 29 percent blue. Colours in flame. Only what fire touches goes black, gold and scarlet along an edge, then ash gray in words and glances. Faces turn. Figures withdraw into the distance. Not even the forest fire others think of raging sets them running. Just blow a smoke ring. Watch the sun weep rubies as they leave, while the surrounding sky turns amethyst. 5. ignescent Sun flashes white and silver between Chinese Elm branches. Petals fall. Small and elliptical, they carpet bare ground in a palette of earth tones, surrounding a trunk mottled light-gray, tan and red. They drain so much colour from the tree that the leaves fall next, a uniform medium brown. bare as it rises. Morning sky glints stainless-steel. Bare branches continue to gleam, pulling surrounding light toward itself. The ground below remains shadowed, as if the tree’s leaves had never dropped. ** This poem was first published in Gleam: A Journal of the Cadralor. ** Excerpts from “Answering Neruda” How do the oranges divide up sunlight in the orange tree? The Book of Questions, XIII August blazed. My brother and I ran as kids through an orange grove near Redlands. Deep-green rows of trees stretched further the more we ran. Fruit unreal as labels pasted to wooden crates. Labels like those pinned and framed on walls inside Whittier’s Sunkist packing house, now an antique store. Something of fiery air and baked ground of that afternoon, like a tree full of oranges at the end of my street. Christmas Day. Storm clouds more smoke than sky. The oranges, too high to reach, almost glow. First raindrops pock the sidewalk like pores in a citrus peel. ** This poem was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly. ** What will your disintegrated bones do, search once more for your form? The Book of Questions, XXXVI Tree roots cross one another like memories, deep and wide. Fungi in soil nurtures roots to take water and nutrients. To let trunk rise, limbs stretch. Like wrapping myself in a comforter from a closet shelf, not from night turning cool but to keep from screaming. Room a bottomless pool and my never having been a strong swimmer. Deep-green knife-edged leaves catch the eye. The clicking, popping language of ravens perched and gossiping likewise the ear. Hints. Accusations. Nevermores. What holds the heart between topsoil and pages of shale? To grow amid disintegration? For dust to reach for sunlight, air? ** This poem was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly. ** What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky? The Book of Questions, XLI A friend is researching this from beyond the grave, taking in the sunlight and wishing someone would place a bench above him to enjoy the fresh air and paint or sketch together. As an artist, he feels strongly about California Oaks tracing patterns on blue paper, letting imagination go cumulous or stratus, depending on mood or wind. Van Gogh, with his ear for cerulean tree roots growing along roadsides, may encourage my friend to be more vibrant with his hues. To taste the August heat without a spoon. A diatribe forms black outlines but there are also tubes of aquamarine. ** This poem was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly. ** Do you not also sense danger in the sea’s laughter? The Book of Questions, XXXIX Portuguese Bend kept slipping through childhood toward Hawaii from the Palos Verses Peninsula. And part of San Pedro really had a good time when the ground took a deep breath and went swimming. Streetcar bells clanged. Rails beneath turned on dimes and prayers. Houses divorced. Walls went to live separate lives. On the rock beach below, someone painted a black background onto a square of cement sidewalk that had run away from home and added the pink outline of a heart. Isolated near a tide pool, it reminded me of parking at the Bend before dawn, listening for something unknown. ** This poem was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly. ** Yesterday, yesterday, I asked my eyes, when will we see each other again? The Book of Questions, XXIII There’s only so much road to view in the mirror before that first cup of coffee. A hundred years’ worth of ghosts sleep and wander in this rooming house, not to mention the loaded lifeboat I drag to the table. Or is it a U-Haul? One ghost keeps dropping pennies into sight, reminding me that I’m not alone, to be careful lowering raw eggs into boiling water. Twelve minutes and an ice bath for the eggs. That and two slices of 12-grain toast. Don’t chew on reflections so much that the world implodes and floats away—just enough to swallow. ** This poem was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly. ** Perhaps they died of shame those trains that lost their way? The Book of Questions, XXVII Plenty of mornings are paint peeling from the riveted skin of an abandoned freight or passenger car. Piebald rainbows, a distressed outlook fragmenting—the eye has a hard time telling the difference, depending on the light. Sometimes a yearning to steam, diesel, move overtakes me, even while something deep inside me oxidizes, as if collapsing into memories. Routine’s a coping mechanism—a walk along tracks going red and orange with rust, wooden ties between them black with moisture, greening with moss, crumbling—but it’s something with a pretense for use. Dust knows where this conversation is heading, the next stop. ** This poem was first published in DMQ Review. ** Isn’t it better never than late? The Book of Questions, XX An axe head flashes its parabola. Bark flies in large, dark scales, smaller fragments, dropping and spinning. The wood beneath gapes, wet and smooth until the metal bites and chunks go flying. You looked and ducked as if my face were reflected in the axe head’s polished sheen, the steel’s sharpened edge ready to chop away roots, trunk, whatever it came into contact with. We didn’t talk for years. Sometimes fear in your eyes stopped me, seeing my tongue as hands wrapped tight around a hickory handle, ready to swing. Sometimes it was a metal wedge somersaulting in my direction. ** This poem was first published in DMQ Review. ** Jonathan Yungkans listens to the pouring Southern California rain 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, MacQueen's Quinterly, Synkroniciti and other publications. |
