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 […]
Jason Ryberg
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.
The White Light of Universal Upload, Etc., Etc.,
I think, before I die, I’d like to live in a lighthouse, for a while, or maybe a succession of lighthouses (if I plan this thing out just right), right up to that point, I guess, where they carry me out in a bag, hopefully […]
Timing the Thunder
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 […]
Pine Box and a Shallow Grave
for Aaron Streelow It’s when you get the blues so damn bad that every song you listen to, no matter the beat or the groove or the tune or what it’s about, even, is still, somehow, then and there, the saddest, most sorrowful and lonesome song you’ve ever heard, and you catch yourself sniffling and […]
Perhaps It Would Help if You Thought of the Poem as …
a hermit’s hovel of many mansions, a shimmering silk kimono billowing on a clothes line in central Kansas, a meteorite, suddenly fallen in your backyard (pulsing with a strangely hypnotic and inviting glow), a particularly toxic strain of word virus, a flaring moment of clarity in the middle of a mosh pit, a tattered travelogue […]