and you found yourself fenced off, wrecked car in a junkyard? Not the big Pick-a-Part places. The ones that barely fit on a house-lot or two. Corrugated metal fence. Guard dogs locked away but snarling. Raise a hood or two. Look at all that burnt wiring. Stranger things have become existential in a hot, dusty Sunday afternoon ritual. Dad and I looking for parts, a whole car to Humpty-Dumpty together and get running to sell for grocery money. 

Smother my more invasive tendencies before I get too needy. Lovely, dark and deep traffic patterns snarl, their oil-stained valentines, lipstick-blotted cocktail napkins, loose change. What else is tucked under the seats, squirreled inside the glove compartment?  How much better dropped into the weeds, at risk of someone screaming from the other side of chain-link that I’m littering when they don’t have a black trash bag or doggie-poo sack for their troubles?

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^[1] Title taken from the poem “The Problem of Anxiety” by John Ashbery, in the collection Can You Hear, Bird.

Jonathan Yungkans continues to type in the middle of the night amid owls and coyotes, happy when his writing is less noxious than the occasional passing skunk. He has written three poetry chapbooks, one e-mini-chapbook of short verse. His full-length volume of poems, prose and photographs, Borrowed from Heaven, is slated for release from MacQ Books in 2026.