
All of the Above
By Jason Ryberg
All of the Above
A book of poems is
a family photo album
for a spectacularly dysfunctional family,
a scrapbook of newspaper clippings,
wedding announcements, obituaries
and concert ticket stubs,
a file cabinet full of classified documents,
elaborately detailed conspiracy theories
and jealously guarded recipes.
A book of poems is
a jelly jar full of fortune cookie fortunes,
an ancient tome of forbidden knowledge,
a grimoire of (otherwise) benign
spells, hexes, hoodoos and charms.
A book of poems is (at least)
equal parts scrapyard and curio shop,
(bus station at 2am / country crossroads at midnight),
a shoebox full of old post cards
and love letters,
a rolodex of dead or merely
recommissioned phone numbers
(I’m sorry, who were you looking for?)
A book of poems is an estate sale for a wealthy,
eccentric hoarder who has been missing
and presumed dead for nearly a decade.
an operator’s manual for a machine
that hasn’t been invented yet,
a road atlas for a lost continent.
A book of poems is …
all of the above.
.
About the Author: Jason Ryberg is the author of twelve 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, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. 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 latest collections of poems are Zeus-X-Mechanica (Spartan Press, 2017) and A Secret History of the Nighttime World (39 West Press, 2017). He lives part-time in Kansas City with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.