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Some Lost Soul

This
train
blows the
same heavy
blue notes in the cool,
rainy dark as it does in the
sun-shiny day at each town along its route, then moves
on down the line to the next, leaving barking
dogs and tree frogs in its wake. A big rig
lets loose with a couple of quick blasts as it passes
right over the train, on the high-
way over-pass, on
its way out
of town.
The
rain
dies
down
to a
slow drip, and
then, from way across
the wet wormy dark – some lost soul
is practicing A Love Supreme on a saxophone.

The Great American After Hours Interzone

The
wind’s
tide is
rushing back
in at us again
from a sunset that looks like the
next county is on fire, through a forest of leafless
trees, cracking and rattling all of its limbs, branches
and twigs together until the surf
finally breaks over us, nearly overwhelming
and dragging us back out with it past the Rubicon
of no return that surely lies
just past the pink / gold fire-line of the horizon,
where highway phantoms will continue
to hiss and roar out there in the dark, now and then, criss-
crossing the Great American
After-Hours Inter-
Zone, long through
the night,
past
dawn,
in-
to
the next
day, maybe,
until they’re either
called home or finally break free.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

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-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 andanthologies. 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.

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