Photography © Edward S. Gault

 

Dresser Top

Plaster busts of James
    Brown and Hank Williams (Sr,
of course) / foreign coins
    from who knows where / a shiny,
gold wind-up robot /
    a switchblade driven into
a green glow skull / a
    pair of dice made ( they say ) from
the knuckle-bones of
    a convict who stood more than
seven-feet tall / and
    an old school Marine
Corps. hip flask full of
    the ashes of a poet
    who died of everything.

 

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.

Edward S. Gault is a poet and fine arts photographer living in Brighton, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Oddball Magazine, Spectrum, Wilderness House Literary Review, Interlude, Currents, and Encore. His poetry collection, Airhead and Other Poems was published this year by Read and Green Books.