Box Fan
The blades of the box- fan in the window make me think of an old ship’s propeller slowly pushing the house through the sweltering Amazon jungle of July in Missouri;
and somewhere, someone is playing Caruso on an old-timey gramophone.
20 Miles to Sturgeon Bay, Sept. 10, 2001 (or, I’ve Always Wanted to Use the Line, "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night ...")
and there I was,
wrestling a five-ton truck
with a fifteen-foot trailer
(and both packed tight, top to back,
I might add) down a twisting
two-lane back road (no shoulder,
no signs, no cell-phone service
for miles) way up there on
the coast of that skinny Wisconsin
peninsula that pokes so broken
pinky-like out into the black and
nebulous gloom of Lake Michigan.
But at least it was relatively
warm and dry inside the cab,
though my partner and I
were still a bit shaken and chilled
to the marrow of our respective
labor-bruised bones by the over-all
unnerving (if not full-on traumatizing)
work conditions we were then currently
enduring, as in the absolutely
merciless and insane Hollywood-style
thunder and lightning and rain (with the
occasional visitation of hail, now
and again) and damn-near zero
visibility beyond the headlight’s
faint and watery glow on the treacherous,
hairpin curvature of the road ahead
and of course the odd moment of
HOLYCRAPWE’REGONNADIE!
But hey, at least we’ve got half a tank of gas,
half a bag of giant pretzel sticks,
a couple cans of some toxic, psychotic
energy drink rolling around, somewhere,
and ZZ Top’s Cheap Sunglasses
is just now coming on the radio
and the sign by the side of the road
says, 20 Miles to Sturgeon Bay
and it looks like we just might
make last call
with time
to spare.
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.