Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee

A Milk Jug Birdhouse

My mind rejects
what my eyes can see. A girl—
using a phone book for a booster seat—
sits at a table in the yard, beside

an aban­doned clothes dryer. She’s
carv­ing a bird­house from an empty milk car­ton.
A suit of armor and a plas­tic pineap­ple
are under a lon­gleaf pine, where drops of rosin

glue sword to fruit. The fields nearby lie fal­low,
and in the dis­tance, as far as I can see. There’s
a sta­tion that used to sell gas, where two roads
make a T. The road that ter­mi­nates is

full of pot­holes. Some­one painted one pot­hole
the same blue as the unclouded sky here.
And on the roof of a rust-red barn—
just past the fallen pile of bro­ken yel­low bricks,

the world’s largest CB antenna, (home­made),
and next to the smashed brown dog-igloo—
Jesus Saves / S & H Green Stamps
is faded but legible.

first pub­lished in Ada­gio Verse Quarterly

Helen Losse is the author of Bet­ter With Friends (Rank Stranger Press, 2009) and two chap­books, Gath­er­ing the Bro­ken Pieces and Paper Snowflakes and the Poetry Edi­tor of The Dead Mule School of South­ern Lit­er­a­ture. Her recent poetry pub­li­ca­tions and accep­tances include Iodine Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Heavy Bear, Hob­ble Creek Review, The Wild Goose Review, and Blue Fifth Review.  Edu­cated at Mis­souri South­ern State and Wake For­est Uni­ver­si­ties, she lives in Winston-Salem, NC.