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Saving the Patient~ By Jonathan Yungkans

1/18/2018

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When they ask me … how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.
--William Carlos Williams
 
 
it feels presumptuous
mentioning doctors
 
maybe it’s that we’re
both poets or healers
walking wounded
 
my brain thinks Kildare
and William Carlos Williams
 
one fiction     one my
touchstone      brief like
Dickinson      Creeley
you your      glints of
subtext     water drops
a river      currents’ depth
the Marianas trench
 
so doctor      which heart
did you really diagnose
 
was it combined twinges
an accrual of scars
stretched loop whorl and line
over “physician heal thyself”
 
whose irregular heartbeat
in a mis-     pronounced word
a stam-     mer into a stethoscope
did you hear     quieter than
a foot trip     or was it that
faint flinch in your eye
which revealed it


Author Bio:
Jonathan Yungkans is a Los-Angeles-based poet, writer and photographer. Growing up in Gardena, California, not far from the Pacific Ocean and at the time still predominantly Japanese-American, left him with three things—an intense love for the sea, a deep appreciation for cultures other than his own and the outlook (and resulting questions) of an outsider aware that he didn’t quite fit into his surroundings. Subsequent years as an ESL teacher and a publications editor for a multi-cultural Christian ministry only added to the latter two of these. His works have appeared in Lime Hawk, Poetry/LA, Twisted Vine Literary Journal and other publications.
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