Photograph of perching hawk © by Jonathan Yungkans. All rights reserved.

Photograph of soaring hawk © by Jonathan Yungkans. All rights reserved.

been thinking of the hawk 
who came every day learning to fly 
keening and keening 

going high before his first full dive 
needle straight 

and how it’s been quiet since then 

B&W photograph of hawk © by Jonathan Yungkans. All rights reserved.

Photographs by Jonathan Yungkans appear here with his permission and are reproduced from his Facebook galleries. The first and third images above are dated June 2024, and the second image (soaring hawk) is dated October 2012.

Jonathan Yungkans

is a writer, photographer, and native of Los Angeles who holds an MFA degree in Poetry from California State University, Long Beach (2019). His poems have appeared in Anastamos; Book of Matches; The Ekphrastic Review; Gleam: Journal of the Cadralor; Gyroscope Review; Heron Tree; The Mackinaw; MacQueen’s Quinterly; NOON: journal of the short poem; Panoply; San Pedro Poetry Review; Silver Birch Press; Sonic Boom; Synkroniciti; Unbroken: journal of prose poetry; West Texas Literary Review; and other publications. His photographs have appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Silver Birch Press, and Synkroniciti, among others.

Yungkans is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Borrowed from Heaven (MacQ Books, May 2026) and The Ravens Will Arrive Later (Gnashing Teeth Press, March 2026). His second poetry chapbook, Beneath a Glazed Shimmer (Tebot Bach, 2021), won the 2019 Clockwise Chapbook Prize.

During what some choose to call normal hours, Jon works as an in-home health-care provider, fueled by copious amounts of coffee, while finding time for the occasional deep breath.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ echo, prose poem (with Poet’s Commentary) by Jonathan Yungkans in MacQueen’s Quinterly aka MacQ (Issue 32, June 2026)

⚡ And All Our Wasted Time Sinks into the Sea and Is Swallowed Up Without a Trace, ekphrastic prose poem by Yungkans, after Symphony of Night by Leon Lundmark, in Issue 26 of MacQ (January 2025)

⚡ Only a Poodle Separates This Life From the Next, 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 MacQ-17 (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)