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.

There's
a
black snake
in the tall
grass, a crow in the
ribcage of a Willow tree, and
some of the old gods have been seen, reportedly, out
walking the cornrows at dusk, whispering about this and that; meanwhile, I'm just sitting
here, sipping a bitter tea brewed from cemetery
grass, making up stories about
the origins of
a Russian
nesting
doll
that
has
washed
ashore,
somehow, on
the muddy banks of
the mighty Gasconade River.