Jonathan Yungkans

The Moon Decrees That It Be with Us Awhile to Enhance the Atmosphere
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after A la Rencontre du Plaisir, by Rene Magritte (Belgium) 1962
 
Or is it me, pulling memories as a basement quilt around my shoulders against the cold, who asks the round moon, rounder than my great-grandmother, to keep me company beside the window? We gaze at each other through the glass of Magritte’s painting—a work of art whose appearance as oil on canvas is a ruse to protect its spiritual alchemy, for in that aspect, it is clear as a windowpane—as it backlights the top of a nearby tree line. Perhaps it was this light which glimmered from the lenses of my great-grandmother’s gold-rimmed spectacles as she tucked my five-year-old self into bed and I nodded off. The moon, 
 
in daylight a pale, mortal shadow of itself, is the round glass ball of the Christmas angel I made in class when I was seven. It hovers in Magritte’s painting out of reach of the bully who shattered it back then into Humpty Dumpty fragments, glittering against blacktop which doubled as the universe. The same kid my mom had encouraged me to have over to my house, to show him the collies we took to dog shows, who taunted me shortly afterwards about all of it in front of everyone at school. I never told Mom about the taunting. Let her stay like a glass bulb on a tree, Magritte’s moon,
 
so that she may float high and out of reach in its wonder—its peachiness in roundness, if not in colour. More like the full moon above the L.A. skyline, pure white and distant, even while seeming close to the buildings and their twinkling golden filigree. Magritte shows its shine but not its face, adding to the mystique that it could flatten the horizon below it into an ocean by a force of will. That could be a welcome change of scene. He leaves a curtain at the right of the painting, pinned open but available. For now, it helps to see the moon is there, safe in its delicate magic.
 
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Title taken from the poem “White-Collar Crime” by John Ashbery, in the collection Shadow Train.
 
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This poem first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly.
 
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Only a Poodle Separates This Life from the Next
 
It was a chihuahua, not a poodle. Tucked in one arm of the guy next to me in the supermarket check-out line. Half-gallon bottle of Hornitos silver tequila in the other arm. Dementia tipped my mom, a bottle, upside down. Emptied her. Washed away what residue of me was left inside.  She’d raised collies and Shetland sheepdogs professionally. Dog shows, puppies and more dog shows. Like the show on TV at a Mexican restaurant while I waited for take-out. A border collie on a thin leash was strutted across the ring’s neon-bright fluorescent blue carpet for judge and camera. A couple of dogs later, a Sheltie. I shattered. Tears, condensation caught in an empty bottle, started to run. Seeing the guy at the market was like watching that show. Like watching a YouTube video of a bald eagle, sailing proud and majestic just above a forest, a poodle in its talons. The dog’s white, fluffy body rocked like a bottle, carried by the neck. The eagle turned. Black wings grew smaller, receding from sight. 
 
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Title taken from the poem “Added Poignancy” by John Ashbery, from his collection Wakefulness.
 
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This poem first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly and was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2024.

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The Waves Advanced as the Tide Withdrew

after the painting La Belle Captive, by René Magritte (Belgium) 1949
 
The ocean is framed in my consciousness to remind me there is such a thing as calm, even if inner piece seems two-dimensional and vandals stop in front of it from time to time to pull out knives or switchblades to scrape away swaths of paint or carve it away entirely. Sometimes they succeed entirely. One of the other residents here snatched a package off the neighbour’s front porch. He placed it carefully on our front porch. When I opened the door and caught him, which in turn caught us both unawares, he said was about to kick it across the street. Since we weren’t on a football field and there was no goalpost in sight, I knew he wasn’t going for an extra point but instead was an art thief posing as a demon to once again snatch my composure. Sure enough, he had cut the canvas from its frame and rolled it up to tuck under his black windbreaker. I saw a corner of it poling up near his collar and proceeded to tell him to stop. A tuba’s notes spewed from my mouth, angry as the fires of hell, only growing hotter the more I tried to speak. Our argument grew fierce. Flames spewed from my mouth. The building caught fire. We stood in the middle of it, oblivious to our impending incineration. He stood immovable as a rock and I continued my brazen cacophony. He took its tide like the boulder he had become and let it crash in wave after wave, the water not even smoothing down his rough edges. He walked away as the building walls collapsed. Only much later, when the smoke had cleared and I saw the empty picture frame on its easel did I realize his true intent. I’m sitting in the dark, waiting for dawn on the beach with a fresh cup of coffee, listening for waves. Smoke lingers. The sky hold its pungency like a smoker’s clothes, a bitter-smelling ashtray. I reach down for a handful of sand. Bring up ashes, warm to the touch. The tide is low and barely whispers. I plan to stay until it rises and can hear it better, perhaps after sunup. 

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Title taken from the poem “Litany” by John Ashbery, in the collection As We Know.
 
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This poem first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly.
 
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Billboard-Size in the Picaresque Night Sky
 
Every day I drive past a billboard for a personal-injury lawyer who died months ago. Someone should amend the tag-line to read, We’ll fight for you from beyond the grave. Or post a new ad—his gaunt, black-suited figure in an overstuffed leather chair, overlooking road and sky. Shades of actor John Barrymore, hijacked from the undertaker for a night at Errol Flynn’s. Or is a preternatural ambulance-chaser cliché, even with L.A.’s penchant for strange and unusual? Too closely resembling zombies who waylay an ambulance, one of them radioing dispatch to send more paramedics? 
 
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Title taken from the poem “Litany” by John Ashbery, in the collection As We Know.
 
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This poem first appeared in Wordrunner eChapbooks Micro-Prose Issue 1.

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This Chaos, the Normal Way of Being
 
The new neighbour hadn’t shown himself for weeks, like he’d never moved there, ignoring the bougainvillea that had once embraced his pergola and he pared back to a short hedge. The vine stretched tall for sunlight, spread pink, white and purple bracts. My great-grandparents, with their purple bougainvillea, had returned from the dead. The neighbour finally clipped it, leaving long, severed bright-green shoots on the street to wilt for days. These eventually disappeared. The sky remained grey as his wife’s car parked out front. Ravens clucked their tongues, gossiping. Other neighbours stayed inside.
 
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Title adapted from a line in the poem “The System” by John Ashbery, in the collection Three Poems.
 
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This poem first appeared in Unbroken.

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As We Found It Comfortable for the Broken Desires
 
Winter rain, which for years had forgotten to exist, forgot to stop falling, twisting and leaping off hillsides with a giggle of psychopath comedians, a brown tide resembling hot chocolate. Black coffee’s my natural outlook. I needed WD-40 to spray my Heavenly Maker’s joints but the market had stopped carrying it months ago. The tide kept rising. It pressed against the towering plate-glass storefront until the glass quivered like jelly. Watching it, I had questions for said Maker, such as Where’s the pizza? and What’s all that blood on the wall?
 
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Title taken from the title poem to the collection A Wave by John Ashbery.
 
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This poem first appeared in Six Sentences.

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Composure is a Gift the Gods Sometimes Bestow

Coyotes howl back and forth at either end of my block just after 3:30 a.m. Already awake, I’m ready to run with that pack. Darkness equalizes. Their baying’s more welcome than keeping a body still, the sapphire-blue comforter weightier than a willingness to slumber. No neighbours pretending mirrors are windows, offering whispers which masquerade silence. The Archangel Gabriel’s a ringer for Miles Davis. Observing. Trumpet in hand to serenade the world’s end. He couldn’t blow a finer solo. Grey fur and a bouncing gait have advantages. Such as feeling less like prey.
 
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Title taken from the poem “In My Way / On My Way,” by John Ashbery, in the collection Hotel Lautréamont.
 
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This poem first appeared in Stink Eye Magazine.
 
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Jonathan Yungkans continues to type at wee hours before dawn and notices an increasing number of gopher holes in his lawn, which reminds him of the editing process and subconscious additions to text but does the grass and fruit trees no good. He continues drinking enough Starbucks House Blend to consider it a blood type. His work has appeared in MacQueen's Quinterly, Sonic Boom, Synkroniciti and other publications. He has also written three poetry chapbooks; the third, The Ravens WIll Arrive Later, is slated for a 2026 release by Gnashing Teeth Press.