"Plumb or Plum?", "Kansas Clouds", "Staring at the Ceiling", & "Cupcake Land" by Jason Ryberg

Plumb or Plum?

There, just outside my 

living room window, are six 

standard issue, old 

school mailboxes fixed               

on top of six wooden posts 

and a street sign at 

an intersection 

that says HWY 23  

and N. Plumb, each one 

leaning at just a 

slightly different angle, 

each one pointing to

a wildly diver-

gent set of coordinates 

up there, in the night 

sky, looking down on 

us, all the time, that are, in 

turn, separated 

themselves, by millions 

of lightyears, and each one of

them with a planet 

that’s almost like ours, 

maybe… But, for some reason, 

the one thing I keep 

coming back to is why 

would these folks name their street 

Plumb instead of Plum?

Kansas Clouds

They look like Kansas clouds, she said, 

raising a postcard up for my inspection 

as she emerged, suddenly (smiling somewhat

triumphantly), from a forest of t-shirts, 

cap-guns, trinkets and toy tomahawks:

a strip of Arizona highway, 1953, 

under a towering cathedral sky crowded 

with cumulus clouds like arctic caps

that someone (mischievous) had set adrift 

to wander with the weather,

their shadows slowly flowing over

the arid landscape below,

most likely unnoticed 

by the hitchhiker

and gas attendant.

Staring at the Ceiling

Woke up to what I

thought was the sizzle and tang

of bacon cooking

and a wandering

piano solo, coming

from somewhere, that seemed

vaguely familiar

to me though I just couldn’t

identify it, 

no matter how long 

I laid there, staring at the 

ceiling, but instead

it was just a soft

summer rain falling on the

steaming grease trap down

in the alley that 

the Thai place next door kept right 

below my open

bedroom window, and

I guess the piano must

have been just a dream.

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen 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 Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023). 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.