she is cooking with the father of an ex-lover a meal for someone who’s just had surgery. god is there but might as well be listening for thunder. she hopes the dream is not a big deal.
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in the idea, god creates only those creatures already identified by the man he can’t shake.
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I am quiet but nobody listens.
I am loneliest when it’s not allowed.
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after a child drowns in a child, the church bathroom is scrubbed in full view of the elderly.
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while thunder remains god’s most solemn prank, the moon is the bottom of a prop tree. there are egg shells on the floor of heaven.
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the bread crumbs were eaten not by birds but by a starving boy with a lost voice who’d wandered from his home in a delirium brought on by a toothache. also, Hansel & Gretel were two rich kids who killed someone’s mother.
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god goes from wall to wall unaware he is god disguised as a graffiti artist.
renderings of my son on a ventilator adorn the moving city.
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in flight, a wasp carries something it’s not. forgiveness works alone.
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I have never seen an attractive god.
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a plastic doll with a human right hand distracts us from the parrot’s empty cage. we have been writing in unison instead of eating. our poverty is so advanced it keeps a fake diary and a real diary but hides them in the same spot.
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I saw my youngest brother born. I saw his mouth. I thought he’d ripped.
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the dark, the ocean. I have two reasons to believe god has not stopped creating. my anger has gone the way of the milkman. his doomed child with her piece of chalk.
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it is childish how much time she thinks I have to touch everything in the store. I am slapped so hard I am sure the mirror’s memory is for show.
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my father holds a cigarette above his head in a hotel shower. at home, my mother puts a clean shirt on the bed and jumps from her death.
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I am secretly happy that you’ve taken an egg for each day of your life to a doll so doll can sleep. as your mother, I often follow a black ball of yarn into the lake of how you remember.
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a male mime bites into a bar of soap…
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her father is just as she imagines-
a man not making siren sounds pulled over by the man who is.
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you will know the hoof of satan’s chosen deer by the way it glows when any female announces from the seat of a stilled tractor that she is pregnant. you will be the age of your mother’s baby bump, older than your father’s knife, and lit by the grape in god’s mouth.
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I am in the saddest grocery waiting with my mother for the happiest bike repair to open.
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dodgeball, no one sad.
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the root of the animal’s insomnia is not man but the fear of personification.
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when my uncle was a baby, he tried to put something in his mouth but couldn’t do it.
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grief is the herd my sadness trails.
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my mother returns every year to the same spot as if it’s a microwave.
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before he goes back to providing the radio play-by-play for an obscure sporting event, father lifts up his shirt to show me the wire jesus wore.
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while smoking a cigar in the shadow of a nervous minotaur, my father wrote the book on moral isolation. in it, he predicted there would be a television show about hoarders and that it would turn god into a sign from god. my mother read the book cover to cover during her fourth and fastest delivery. if there were edits, she kept them to herself and put his name beside hers on seasonally produced slim volumes of absolute shyness.
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death takes its place at the head of the table to tell the only story it knows to plates of untouched food.
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trespassing, I approach two dimming flashlights set upright in cemetery mud that in your recollection are the horns of an empty beast.
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as spotless as the dog left it, the baby’s room has come to mean today. above a different dog, people ask us what we’re having. we do our jigsaw of darkness. clone the ape that created god’s boredom.
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I find the boy’s name on a list in another boy’s diary. a gun goes off in a dream I don’t have anymore.
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Jason Ryberg is the author of twelve books of poetry, six screenplays, and a few short stories. 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 and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River.
***
Treehouse Fallen in the Backwoods
Kind of a curious thing
to come upon a fallen treehouse,
all of a sudden, in the deep Missouri backwoods
(somewhere in that hazy, uncharted zone
between North and South, noon and sundown);
one of those classic contemplative moments,
we could assume, that the universe
randomly puts in our paths, from time to time:
no other signs of civilization or human activity
of any kind for miles,
no reason one would…
View original post 144 more words
eating for the child lost by ghost, you are the second of three people who know god’s middle name. oh how I’ve written to avoid reading. to impress death.
a babysitter’s tattoo. the bird-sleep of ache.
a painting of your whereabouts. the popcorn stoning of your first wheelchair. soft edits. pentagram. spider.
the look of a thing that wants no hands.
I hate baseball but enjoy covering my left hand.
headache
oh pearl
of birth
never be more creative than your abuser.
I’ll bring christ, you
canary
kingsoftrain 