Any Given Night

I would wager
                     the single one dollar bill
         and sixty-some-odd cents
                                     I have in my pocket (or the
hundred and sixty-some
               thousand dollars in gold coins
                                                  that I may or may not have
                             buried in rusty mason jars
       out in my backyard) that
                                     there are few night skies
                   on any given night (above
                                                         any locale the world over)
                                               as congested with stars as
the night skies of Kansas,
                nor spaces as all-over wide-
                                                open with as much wild blue
         yonder and mountainous
                                                       cloud range above, nor
                                      rising and falling backroads
                        through rolling, tumbling hills
                                                                          of green below.

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen 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 collection of poems is The Great American Pyramid Scheme (co-authored with W.E. Leathem, Tim Tarkelly and Mack Thorn, OAC Books, 2022). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO 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.