Bio

Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-two 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-inresidence 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 "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.

I
woke
with a
grunt from a
strange dream wherein I
had been reincarnated in
the next life as a young orphan girl selling matches
on the streets, only to soon realize that
I had jumped, immediately, from one
dream state to another like a spacecraft slipping from
worm hole to worm hole and was now,
apparently, cursed
to be the
captain
of
a
lost
ship
of ghosts,
forever
aimless and adrift,
on a sea of endless gray fog
(which I could tell was going to get old really quick).