don’t try 
Bukowski’s tombstone inscription reads. 
so Fred didn’t try. 
he just did 

and every year on Bukowski’s birthday 
sat cross-legged next to the grave
wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans
thumbing 
through pages of Bukowski
for something good
and appropriate

yellow sunflower
against polished dark marble,
yellow Bukowski’s favorite color.
no beer or wine
just thankfulness
for Bukowski writing stripped-down verse
about beer 
women 
and human nature—

Bukowski’s lack of bullshit
what attracted Fred
after Fred
had waded through a deep high pile
getting his PhD
in literature

and gone from classrooms into sweat 
roaring air 
steel shavings on the shop floor
working a machine press
and writing poems
his own bullshit-intake meter 
set to zero. 

Poet’s Note

Fred Voss passed suddenly on January 26, 2025, the day before my dad. Fred had been a major voice on the Long Beach, California poetry scene, along with his wife Joan Jobe Smith and Gerald Locklin. He was active until the end, working at a machine shop and writing poems.

I first encountered Fred at a publication party for Pearl, a literary magazine which Joan Jobe Smith co-edited with Marilyn Johnson and which became a nexus for the Long Beach and South Bay poetry scene. My contact over the years was sporadic but friendly.

The last time was at William Mohr’s 2023 birthday party at a San Pedro gallery where Mohr and his wife both painted. Fred took me aside to walk the gallery, talking about the artwork and Dostoevsky as if I was a long-lost friend—a far cry from the slightly gruff and sarcastic blue-collar persona of his poems, though that mask like Bukowski’s was based partly on truth. I wish I had gotten to know him a lot better.

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)