There’s
an
old horse
pulling an
old wagon full of
old mattresses down the foggy,
early morning side-street of this gothic urban dream-
scape (circa 1920-something, maybe),
the street lamps like rows of gallows, slowly
flickering off in succession, maybe a single
crow poking at something in the gutter, and a cat
watching what should have been the score
of a lifetime, now flapping away, suddenly,
before he can even process what’s
happening; and, all in all, it really hasn’t been
that bad of an afterlife, so
far (as my only
other real
option
was
to
be
a
deck hand
on a lost,
wandering ship of
ghosts who didn’t know they were dead).
Ghosts Who Don’t Know They’re Dead
Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-five 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 work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review and various other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is And When here Was No Crawfish, We Ate Sand (co-authored with Abraham Smith, Justin Hamm and John Dorsey (OAC Press, 2025)). 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.