We were waiting for
a storm to brew while the moon
played accordion
and wore a paper-
boy hat (rakishly angled),
looking down on the
empty streets of our
nameless little town that most
people only seemed to
remember because
of something horrible that
happened here a long
time ago. But it’s
just another Friday night
down here and nothing
to do but watch the
lightning on the horizon
and time the thunder.
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.