Turquoise leaves, discarded, mask parking lots, 
and it’s everything I do Covid season, 

	everything I do, not to lay fervent hands 
	on toes in Pentecostal euphoria, 

touch toes and euphorically kiss my ass 
goodbye, before whatever Hail to the Chief, 

	hail to the thief in the night or Hail Mary 
	sends me spiraling in football season, 

anxiety a desperate, soaring ball, 
while I watch blue face masks choke street gutters, 

	while I watch blue leaves pile that were faces 
	toward faces turned celeste from shortness of breath, 

short on time, blacktop dappled cerulean 
with descended undergrowth, cast-off façades. 

* Poet’s Note:

Title is from the poem “Life as a Book That Has Been Put Down” by John Ashbery, in his collection April Galleons (The Viking Press, 1987).

Jonathan Yungkans

is a Los Angeles-based writer and photographer with an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. His work has appeared in San Pedro Poetry Review, Synkroniciti, West Texas Literary Review, Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor, MacQueen’s Quinterly, 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

⚡ Le Grand Matin by Jonathan Yungkans, a Finalist in MacQ’s Triple-Q Writing Challenge (Issue 11, January 2022)

⚡ La Porte by Yungkans in MacQ’s special Christmas Eve issue (10X, December 2021)

⚡ Two Duplex Poems, plus author’s notes on the poems and on the form, by Yungkans in Issue 10 of MacQ (October 2021)

⚡ Lawful and Proper, poem in Rise Up Review (Fall 2020)

⚡ Cadralor in the Key of F-Sharp as It Cuts into My Spine, in the inaugural issue of Gleam (Fall 2020)

⚡ I’d Love to Cook Like Hannibal Lecter [video], read by the poet at an event sponsored by Moon Tide Press (10 October 2019) celebrating the anthology Dark Ink: A Poetry Anthology Inspired by Horror

⚡ Saving the Patient, poem in The Voices Project (18 January 2018)