The Universe Does Provide
for Steve Bridgens
Even after the sun
has long since gone down,
the brutal, kiln-like intensity
of a day like today
(here, in this overgrown cow town
in late July) can still be felt
well into the night.
The sidewalks and driveways
and newly resurfaced streets
continue to throw off enough heat,
all our overgrown yards enough jungle steam
(due to a brief, but mean, little thunderstorm
this morning that not even
the weatherman had foreseen)
that our clankity old window-unit
is forced to shift down a few degrees
into a lower, more determined gear.
Still, something has called us all out here
to the front porch, tonight:
Maybe those recent reports of lightning on the horizon?
Constellations of fireflies churning before our eyes?
The tidal pull of a fat, blood orange of a moon?
Or, just the inevitable madness of tiny rooms?
All we really need to know
(here on this not-so-disagreeable night
in Kansas City, KS in late July)
is there’s an hour of Mingus
coming up on the community radio,
a fridge full of beer getting colder and colder
and a one-hitter already loaded up for you
and ready to go.
So, even though we all got jobs
that come calling way too early in the morning
and bills and debts that, over time, seem to have become
highly resistant to our attempts at neutralizing them
and despite all the headlines and sound bites
(detailing the latest home-grown inanity
or gruesome instance of international mayhem)
that appear to be conspiring to reinforce
the near-blasphemous notion that can
so easily lead one to believe otherwise,
from time to time
the universe does provide.
Joining the Game
Under a late sun, everything sour and wet,
a dog chasing ducks (who occasionally
turn and snap back), through the rust
and bronze colored leaves where
squirrels can also be seen, now
and then, joining the
game and then,
before
you
know
it,
Night
has brought
out all her
crickets and fireflies
and whippoorwills, and wants you to
stay up all night with her and her
strange carni children.
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 roosternamed 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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