It’s Like Following Footprints
in the Sand; Do Not Confuse the
Footprints for the Feet, Themselves
One day, while I was
retracing my own footprints
along the hybrid,
winding path of being and
non-being (being
as careful as I could not
to confuse them for
my feet (the sun, much like a
flaming Buddhist monk,
suspended in the sky, and
the wind, very much
like the tattered fabric of
memory, flapping,
uncontrollably around
me)), I came upon
a man dressed as a monkey
(or a monkey dressed-
up as a man, maybe?) who
had, apparently,
fallen from a tree and was
having a bit of
an identity crisis,
muttering, over
and over, to himself, man
or monkey, monkey
or man?, until I said, my
good man, why can’t you be both?
Sliding Down the Straight Razor of Heaven
The summer air is
boiling over and roiling
with the black shadows
of buzzards and crows, and the
early evening
sky is a bright, neon lip-
stick smear of orange
and red (with a thin stripe of
coagulated
blood that has pooled on the frayed
and tattered tree line
(the sun, already, having
slid all the way down
the straight razor of Heaven
(much like the fabled
philosopher’s stone plunging
to the bottom of
a well)), as it does at the
end of each day, in
order to be baptized in
the black river of the void).
Devil on the Line
Waking, suddenly,
in nearly total darkness
from a late after-
noon nap (wherein I had been
dreaming that I was
a disgraced opera singer
in a former life),
the television playing
with the sound on mute
and the clock blinking as if
there’d been some kind of
power outage while I slept.
Outside, the night was
beginning to descend its
grand staircase and a
poodle was barking from the
fourth-floor balcony
of the apartment building
across the street, and
now the phone is ringing and
it’s the Devil on
the line (yes, that Devil), and
he’s wanting to know
if I planned on coming in-
to work, this evening, or what?
A Change in the Weather
In this dream, for some
reason, I’m always driving
around the streets of
my hometown in the middle
of a crazy-ass
thunderstorm full of lightning
and what seems like
artillery shells going
off all around me,
with a mixed drink of some kind
in the cup-holder
and maybe one of Chopin’s
nocturnes playing on
the radio, and then the rude,
sudden intrusion
of the spooky, robotic
skronk and squeal of the
National Weather Service
announcing that a
severe thunderstorm warning
has been issued for
the surrounding area,
then cuts right back to
the music, and it’s pretty
much the same dream each
time, mostly just me driving
around in the rain,
retracing old routes and paths,
looking for old haunts
and hide-outs from my past,
feeling, again, those
old aches and pains from nearly
forgotten wounds that
still flare-up, now and then, with
the right change in the weather.
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.
