You called it Hell’s Half Acre but bought the land for it 
and nailed white aluminum sheets, after a day at the office, 
day after day to form a roof because Mom wanted a kennel 
to raise collies. Before that, you poured concrete dog runs, 
one wheelbarrow at a time, and sunk steel pipes onto which 
to stretch chain-link, rest wooden roof beams. You always 
gave Mom what you could afford, sometimes just in sweat, 
but always something tactile. Nails vibrated between fingers 
as you hammered, chain-link unrolled and stretched tight 
as arm muscles until wired into place.  
							How very slippery, 
like water or motor oil, words between us. That’s whining 
and I didn’t want to go there but. Spelling things out, I had 
no choice but to go there. There’s still a viscosity between 
a solid steel shaft and how it rings as plunges into wood, 
in a sentence changing resonance as it is driven deeper 
by whatever hammers it—until, in securing, nothing 
is secured, a plank flapping against a beam in a gust, 
hinged and unhinged by the hinging. 
                                    		      You want me 
to be clear but it’s clearly in front of us—the hinge cup,
the arm, the mounting plate where we expected a corner,
a right angle fastened. A static metaphor exchanged
for something more fluid, which moves. I don’t know
which of us turns and which stays screwed into a jamb.
Maybe both—we take turns as the door and the jamb—
as the pin holds, thin and seeming tenuous, hard to bend
while turning. 
            	     Maybe that’s the problem—not knowing
when either of us is screwed into the door or the jamb—
who moves or who is locked into a frame, set in a wall.
I wish we were a bifold door, swinging like an accordion
into something resembling together. The door you set 
in the back of the garage, after you had my brother and me 
knock stucco from the wall with a couple of hammers—
something approaching a game. You cut away the studs,
installed the jamb. The door folded corner to corner—
four old wooden doors hinged together, pulled forward
and pushed back, white and pale yellow and tan. How
long was it before you painted them? All I remember
is the opening and closing. Like an entire wall flexing. 

Bio: Jonathan Yungkans