my nerve snaps 
skateboard wheels’ slap 

landing 
hard 
and fully loaded on a sidewalk 
from the curving 
top of my brick wall 

a good 10- or 12-foot drop 
on a steep hill. 

second 
or third year in a row I chase them off 

the voice from my throat razor-edged green glass 
tone even 
but not normally mine. 

they look at me like I’m the resident old fuck 
and I am 

what George Carlin 
defined 
as an old fart with a mouth 

and a mouth 
meaning 
an attitude 
and an overflowing sewer’s worth of vocabulary 
even 
fluent 
in Samuel L. Jackson. 

teenager’s back on the wall 
ready 
for another jump 
not thinking he might crack his skull 
or what else 
he might break or rupture 

performing 
what David Letterman called a stupid pet trick. 

jackass 
would be a more recent term for it 
but why insult donkeys? 

he leaves 
the second or third time I tell him to go. 

another kid 
across the street with a video camera 
slung 
across his shoulder 
pointed straight at me 
rolling. 

“you want something to shoot” 
I shout 
like Moses to the camera 

and flash 
a double-bird 
in place of the 10 Commandments 

rising 
like a fucking phoenix 
from an ash pile 
of disdain 
that feels like a steaming wet turd 

afraid 
only later 
that my boss might hear about it 
or see it online 
and want to ask about my current mental state 

and after that 
wondering 
how many views I might really get 
on social media. 

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)