The Totality of What Isn’t There
Jason Ryberg
That unassuming
little zero hiding there
in plain site on the
integer line between 1
and negative-1
might, one day, stretch and yawn and
swallow the universe, whole.
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 ē·rā/tiō, 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.