A Day on the Farm, Pt. 2

A grackle perched on a fence post
beneath an electric blue sky
where mountains and fat landmasses of cloud
do their continental drift thing.

Tiny sets of wings,
blue, yellow, orange,
like the petals of wildflowers,
flutter up from the grass.

The wind and the trees are twisting
together (like they did last summer
and who knows how many summers before).

A sparrow is sitting on the driver’s
side mirror of a beat-to-shit pick-up truck
in the middle of a clump of grass and weeds
grown conspicuously tall
on a small square of the property
where all else is kept fairly low
to the ground.

Keys still in the ignition.
Battery still good.
Radio works.

Motherfuckin’ Chuck Berry.

Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-two books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and countless love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review and various other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is “Bullet Holes in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns in the Sheets) Back of the Class Press, 2024)).” He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.