The Moon Has Many Wedding Dresses
Jason Ryberg
It seems as if we’ve
stumbled upon a moment
of positively
protean uncanniness
(beating with a heart
of jungle darkness) while yet
another super-
moon slides, lazily, across
this cloudless summer
sky (in one of her many
wedding dresses), and
the very air is teeming
with the unified
background music of crickets
and cicadas and
perspiring with beads of sweat
like rarest pearls, and
I’ve been told that the spaces
between the spokes are
what make the wheel, and the search
and the thing sought for
are one and the same, and of
course, everybody
knows it’s bad luck to lean a
shovel against a tombstone.
Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-five 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 And When There Was No Crawfish, We Ate Sand (co-authored with Abraham Smith, Justin Hamm and John Dorsey (OAC Press, 2025)). 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.