Five Poems by Jason Ryberg

 

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.