Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming back our final Featured Artist for “Haunting,” Los Angeles area writer, poet and photographer Jonathan Yungkans, with “Gardening with Napoloeon” and “We All Came to Be Here Quite Naturally.” The first is a comedic and dreamlike flash fiction in which the narrator is pruning back wildness in a California garden with Napoleon. Perhaps a bit of community service for the long dead dictator?
“We survey the coming battlefield. Pomegranate, tangerine, cape plumbago, dark green and rangy. They resemble furniture hastily thrown up as barricades. The last person who tended these trees let them grow wild. Napoleon shakes his head. He will have none of this, but it is something to infiltrate later. We soldier on.”
Jonathan’s play on words–English and French is endearing and clever, and this piece reflects the way our dreams put things together with an abundance of synchronicity and odd association, that reveals a mind at work behind the scenes.
“We All Came to Be Here Quite Naturally” is an ekphrastic poem based on Marianne von Werefkin’s 1910 painting Women in Black, which shows a group of women dressed in black carrying their washing to the river. He likens these heavy loads to the griefs that attach to us when loved ones are suffering and die. It becomes a heartbreaking and personal poem as he recalls the death of his sister-in-law.
“My wife opens her late sister’s travel bag from the hospital,/ filled with teddy bears and unicorns. A flash-flood of tears./ She has me throw it away. The hurt cannot be thrown away.”
Read Jonathan’s masterful storytelling and sculpted poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Jonathan Yungkans sips iced pumpkin spice cold-brew coffee in hope that cooler thoughts might prevail in the last of the summer heat waves. Occasional helpings of Haagen-Dazs Vanilla Swiss Almond ice cream have also helped fuel his imagination in this regard. His work has appeared in Gleam, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Panoply and other publications.