BECAUSE IT WAS THERE
ALM No.91, July 2026
POETRY
nothing much was happening
Some street corner
scene where we might have stopped and
talked, once, just for a
little while, as the shine wore
off the day and the
streetlamps started to flicker
on and night’s blanket
of stars began to creep up
over the sky, and
nothing much was happening
with either one of
us, so we both just went our
own separate ways,
after promising, over
and over, that we’d
get together, sometime soon,
and really meaning it, too.
Because it Was There
Surely, carrying
the block less carved along the
road less traveled to
the top of a mountain just
because it was there must lead
to something like Nirvana.
Wherein the Poet is Visited by
the Ghosts of Buddha Past, Present
and Future
Despite having been
visited many times in
his life by the ghosts
of Buddha past, present and
future, still the poet fails
to reach true enlightenment.
Sad, Gray and Russian
The
scene
calls for
leaves falling,
maybe a little
mist, maybe a little wind, but
most definitely an old blind man playing an old
violin (which, of course, later on turns out
to be a Stradivarius which he’s
being forced to sell, for some unknown reason) and it’s
something sad, gray and Russian that
he seems to be lost
in, and right
over
there,
a
young
girl,
who has
been sitting
by herself most of
the day on a park bench, weeping.
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 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.
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