New Poetry by Jason Ryberg

Storm a’ Comin’

There’s a blanket of black wool
that’s been pulled over the city

(over this little nameless hole in the prairie).

There’s squadrons of orn’ry flies
buzzin’ about and stingin’ and the faded, 
ringin’ reports of car horns, here and there.

There’s pages of splayed-open books
on auto repair and Common Missouri
Wildflowers whipping and flipping
in a nervous Missouri wind.

There’s cats and dogs
conspicuously ducking for cover
and birds takin’ the last bus out of town.

There’s a heavy incandescent density to things
like the boiler-rooms of all the world
are just about      to blow 
and everybody, everywhere
secretly seems to know it
and even though it’s only 4PM,
the only light to speak of
is the ghosted-out fluorescent resin
of oxide lamps just now ghostin’ in.

And over across town,
on the far side of the train yards, 
right next door to Big Maybelle’s Beauty Emporium,
there’s two old boys sittin’ on the front porch
of a boarding house, 
hootin’ at all the sweet, young things 
as they come and go,

sippin’ on their whiskey drinks 
real, real slow 

in sweetly calibrated synchronization
with the melting of the ice cubes.

Their bones are ancient humming architectures
of radio towers and tuning forks.

Their pop-bottle bi-focals peer deep into the future.

One of them leans over a little
and says to the other,

Storm a comin.’ 

Yup. 


- © Jason Ryberg 2020

Jason Ryberg is the author of thirteen 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, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. 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 Standing at the Intersection of Critical Mass and Event Horizon (Luchador Press, 2019). He lives part-time in Salina, KS with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River.