Flea Market
Lost on the backroads
outside of Linn, Missouri,
looking for a flea-
market my GPS is
saying is out here, somewhere.
x/y
A bedroom full of
ceramic Buddhas, smiling
from every shelf,
surface and corner in the
room at one central x/y.
Waiting to Release
Late April again
and all day the air has been
heavy and slow with
weather, waiting to release
everything it’s been holding
in for the last several weeks.
Acute Phantom Life Syndrome:
the deep feeling or
sensation that you’re missing
something that either
died in the womb or never
existed in the first place.
Getting off the Ground
Hell,
at
that age,
you’re mostly
still dealing with each
other’s avatars and public
relations agents, anyway, with always the hope,
of course, that the real thing peaks through, here and
there, until the masks and shields and deflectors
are no longer needed, that is if the whole damn thing
is structurally sound enough
to support itself
under the
stress of
its
own
weight,
let
alone
get off the
ground and keep it there.
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 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 “Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023).”
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.
