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.
--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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