Piled at the back of the house, 
the whole vine, thorn, leaf and bract 
alongside the back door, cut, 
raked from the breezeway and laid 
on tarps that are winding sheets 

and with that bougainvillea—
yellow and purple and green 
fallen, raked from the breezeway 
after the gas trimmer’s buzz—
Grandma and Pappy died again, 

again the late-night phone call, 
Mom’s scream cutting through my sleep, 
when Grandma passed. Gardeners 
khakied like Pappy, long-sleeved 
and hushed, the intermittent 

rapid-fire Spanish chatter, 
like leaf skitter past silence 
of a barren white trellis—
weathered paint peeling from beams 
that had once again been trees, 

were trees again while swathed 
with tendrils, leaved and flowered. 
I think of spice-drop cookies, 
Grandma and I making them 
in her white-as-noon kitchen—

white as light pouring in now 
at my stairway—cabinets 
Pappy built, their tiny hinges 
and latches, delicate steel 
“older than Methuselah,” 

Grandma would say—old as me 
missing them, absence a hole 
like one dug to plant a tree, 
yawning for its root-ball and soil 
beneath the lives that slip past—

while one gardener, job done, 
sits atop a brick planter, 
dressed in black with his iPhone, 
back turned to the wood-chipper 
while the crew there feed it years. 

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)