A Tiny Drop of Truth — By Jason Ryberg
Sometimes the summer night’s hot whisper
is nothing more than a black snake’s hiss of a word
we cannot always quite discern-
a momentary corridor
of connectivity between us
and the outer darkness
between the stars-
a smooth shiny pebble of a word
barely graspable in its hard
slippery-sloppish-ness,
nearly as ethereal on its surface
as the thought
at its dark heart,
a thought with a tiny drop of truth
in its blood, like a poison,
secretly insinuated into
the winding stream of things
in an attempt to stimulate some sort of healing
of the tear between the way things appear to be
and the way things really are,
a truth that by fevering up the blood a bit
and disquieting deep dreams
and maybe thereby prying open the inner onion-eye
that sleeps, deeply, at the center of the mind
forces itself
to at least be disbelieved.
~ Jason Ryberg
Jason Ryberg is the author of twelve 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, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. 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 collections of poems are A Secret History of the Nighttime World (39 West, 2018) and Lone Wolves, Black Sheep and Red-Headed Stepchildren (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2018). He lives part-time in Kansas City and Salina with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.
Guest Editor Al Ortolani’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and the Chiron Review. He is the recent recipient of the Rattle Chapbook Award for 2019. Ortolani is the Manuscript Editor for Woodley Press in Topeka, Kansas.