GAS Featured Poet: Jason Ryberg

 

 Jason Ryberg is the author of nineteen 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 “Bullet Holes in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns

in the Sheets) (Back of the Class Press, 2024).” 

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. 

Miles Away

 

 

God’s cold blue eye

is peering

through the window

tonight,

 

while the wind

is attempting to squeeze

the life from the house

with its old farmer’s hands.

 

And still the mysterious

mechanical cricket

turns the crank

on its rusty music box

in the basement.

 

Meanwhile, miles away

from the once virgin plain

of the page,

a range war is raging

in the canyon

of my skull

 

and here I sit,

waiting for the signal,

but the lines are down

from the fighting.