What Can Be Out of the Ordinary?
red-roofed white farmhouse
winter-coated Icelandic sheep
hay bales wrapped in pink
green and blue plastic
a piece of flapping orange
caught by barbed wire
loan raven surfing
others stop at the roadside pullout
after I (mind turns) after I created
a Yellowstone bear jam
to count near-fledging ospreys
in the nest topping the fir
leaning above a rain-swollen
mud-brown Lamar rapid
the tourists’ disappointment
no grizzly or wolf (mind
one-eighties) this waterfall
stair stepping a glacial-melt
blue-gray river to the ocean
I’ll leave unnamed
Michael G. Smith, Bozeman, MT, is a chemist. His poetry has been published in many literary journals. His books include No Small Things and Flip Flop, a collection of haiku co-written with Miriam Sagan. His poem Disturbance Theory. Glacier was selected to be photographed and displayed in Antarctica in early 2021 by the Antarctic Poetry Exhibition https://www.antarcticpoetry.com/. He does volunteer work at the local food bank, and at a school and orphanage in Kathmandu, Nepal.
See more of his work in 9.2 and 9.2