Jason Ryberg - Issue 37

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. 

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Rowing Myself Across the River Styx

While I was busy

     drinking pink champagne from the 

silver slipper moon

     and snorting pixie dust off 

the plastique tit of

     a fallen angel type, I 

suddenly noticed

     my burial shroud didn’t 

have any pockets

     (having been snatched up rather

unexpectedly 

     by the deus ex machina

of fate from a some-

     what tense and precarious 

moment like one of 

     those Magic Claw toy machines 

descending from the 

     clouds) and, apparently, I

was gonna have to 

     row myself in my own damn

     coffin across the river.