Scarecrow Standing at a Crossroads There’s a blackbird between the shadows of two white houses, the midnight train is a silver river of moonlight, the cornfield is now a haunted forest of skeletal husks, and it would appear that the old, madcap, vaudeville, soft-shoe dancer of a scarecrow, who, one day who knows how many years ago, just seemed to have showed-up, out there, outta nowhere, has moved on, now (his past finally catching up with him, I guess).
About the Author: 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 The Great American Pyramid Scheme (co-authored with W.E. Leathem, Tim Tarkelly and Mack Thorn, OAC Books, 2022). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
Image Credit: John Vachon “Scarecrow, North Carolina” (1938) Public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 