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Poetry

I am a lineman for the county…

By Jason Ryberg

Now this is some old

school elevator music​

says the guy riding

up with me (each to our own​

individual

vertical destinies (with​

no resting place for

either one of us on this​

shared journey to what-

ever private fates await​

us, respectively)),

and it seems to be a sweet​

and syrupy string

arrangement of Glenn Campbell’s​

Wichita Lineman,

and we both just sort of Zen-​

out and mumble the

words to ourselves while watching​

the floor number go

up, and apparently, old​

school elevator

music is not without its​
psychological effects.
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Published in Open Arts Forum on .

Selected by Raymond Huffman·
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Jason Ryberg

Jason Ryberg

Jason Ryberg is the author of nineteen 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 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.

More by Jason Ryberg →