By Jason Ryberg

Two
cows
in the

middle of
a country road, just
standing there, gnawing on clumps of
grass, it seems, looking at us like a couple of bold-
ass trespassers daring to dare roll up on
their turf, unannounced, to desecrate their
sacred, bovine grazing grounds, which doesn’t quite explain
why they’re standing in the middle
of this road of sand
and gravel,
staring
at
us
as
we,
in-turn,
stare back at
them, and it’s hotter than Satan’s
crotch out here and neither side likely to concede, soon.

---

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.