The guitar player
seemed moody that night and so
did his playing (the
room humming with a
pensive nostalgia (the moon
having put one of
her many hexes
on this sweaty Missouri
ev’ning, no doubt)) and
the fishing trawler
of my mind had drifted off-
course into strangely
calm waters where more
questions than answers swam just
below the surface.
For example: how
did the Earth and the human
race survive for as
long as they did with-
out anybody ever
cutting the grass or
raking the leaves? When
did our tongues first spark and flare
with the flame of speech?
And why did the One
True God not say there are no
other gods BUT me?
About the Author
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 There 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.
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