I
think
about
those women,
sometimes, who fluttered
in and out of my life, every
now and then, like strange, bright birds with the power to stop
my heart, my breathing, my ability to speak

or think, even, the spinning of the ​

earth, hell, time itself, and I wonder where some of them
are these days, all these years later,
where their lives lead them,
and did some-
one, for
some
of
them
at
least, turn
out to be
the “one” about which
so many movies and novels and
songs are cranked out every year, but, what
I guess I mostly think about are all the things

I could have done differently.​
Selected byRaymond Huffman
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.