HAUNTED FOREST (Tanka)

Haunted Forest (Tanka)

Eventually,
I was guided home through the
dark haunted forest
of my dreams by the bright flame
of a lone redwing blackbird.

Western Sky (Tanka)

Traveling at night

on a train through the desert,

under chandeliers

of stars in the western sky -

the mind becomes a diamond.

Dreams of Confetti and Sugar Skulls (Busokusekika)

I must have plunged right
through my mattress, straight down in-
to a deep dream full
of confetti and sugar skulls
and a glass eye floating in
a snifter of fine cognac.

Portrait of Hummingbirds, Butterflies and Cicadas (Tanka)

Waking to the free-
floating flames of hummingbirds,
butterflies and the
cracked-open and abandoned
straight-jackets of cicadas.

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.