A
sweat
bee is
cleaning its
antenna in the
morning sun while a butterfly
is flexing its wings, like lungs (like bellows), waiting for
just the right current of wind to come along and
climb onto. And it appears that the
sky’s particular frequency of blue, today, is
going to be somewhere between cornflower
and swimming pool (with a few clouds, here and
there) and you’d think that the odds would be pretty
good for there being at least one nameless bunch
of bones (that used to be a person), buried out in
this field, or one like it, somewhere:
maybe a rock or
a cow skull
placed there
for
a
head-
stone,
maybe
a tree from
a seed, planted down
there with them, in which a lone crow
is now reposing. Or, maybe there’s nothing to mark
this final resting place. Maybe it’s just wind and
grass for miles in every direction.
Jason Ryberg
Jason Ryberg is the author of nineteen 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 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.
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