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 countless love letters, never sent. 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. 

Ghost Town Memories

     If 
there’s 
           one way 
       not to spend 
                        the already brief 
               and unspecified allotment 
of time that’s been given to you, then I’d think spending 
                       the second half of it obsessively and
            meticulously sifting through the old,
faded ghost town memories of the first half, for where 
                          and when, exactly, it was you 
         think things started to 
                              go so wrong, 
                        surely 
                               must
                                        be 
                                   it.                                   

My Own Personal Underworld

             It
would
       seem he’s 
                     part soldier,
         harlequin and high 
                           trapeze artist, this guy, I mean, 
who visits me in my dreams, sometimes, like my very 
         own personal Virgil, giving me the first class                   
                        guided tour through what appears to be 
my own personal underworld (that, while not being
                particularly hellish, by 
                               any means, still has 
             a kind of
                            moody,
                    weird, 
                                old
                                       late,
                          late
                                 movie
                 atmosphere
                                   about it, as it 
                         plays out beneath a circus tent, 
let’s say, stitched together from 
                                      silk bed sheets and night gowns, 
                within the ruins of an old gothic cathedral  
                                full of strangely calm black chickens.             

Alarm Clock

Sometimes I wonder
     if my life would have turned out
differently if I’d
     been woke each morning by a
kinder, gentler alarm clock.