I found Teri and Bukowski 
have something in common. 
put her 
in a fucking walker 
and she’ll kick my ass. 

she’s fine with a wheelchair, 
to sit in one 
as we watch the sun go down together 
or city lights 
far past and below us to the west 
in crystalline 
electric blue and white 
in the October air 
just starting 
to steep with winter’s chill. 
it’s her favorite time of the day 
and my second-favorite 
just below 
when I tuck her into bed 

but a walker? 
forget it 
I tell everyone 
she’s Boston Irish, 
I don’t mess with her 
and I mean it. 
Shakespeare had Teri pegged 
when he wrote 
about Katherine in Taming of the Shrew,
“she may be little 
but she is fierce.” 

forget Paul McCartney’s line 
on whether you’ll need me, 
whether you’ll feed me 
when I’m 64. 
Teri will need me 
and I’d better 
have my piggyback muscles toned up. 
I suspect I’ll need them 
or be ready 
to wear a fucking walker 
wrapped 
around my fucking head 
instead of a Dodger’s baseball cap. 

better still, 
I’ll watch the fucking doctor wear one. 
“the fuckin’ doktah” 
Teri will wail, 
her voice a siren firing up. 
she might as well 
have Michael Buffer announce 
“are you ready to rumble” 

and like when James Bond 
sees that industrial laser 
ready to split him 
in half from the balls up 
and he says to Auric Goldfinger 
“you expect me to talk” 
and Goldfinger says 
“no Mr. Bond 
I expect you to die”— 
I’m not ready to rumble. 
I’m ready to run. 

so I’ll stand back 
glad it’s not me 
if Teri’s doctor 
ever mentions a fucking walker. 
like it says 
in the lyrics to another song, 
he’s young 
and foolish in his ways. 

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 Tebot 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)