Stopping to Take a Piss on a Cross- Country Trek After Being Tailed by a Cop for the Last Ten Miles by Jason Ryberg

This hot night,

beside a country road that runs
roughly parallel to the Missouri River,

leaning against the car
under the light of countless stars
and listening to Sam and Dave on the radio,

passing what’s left of a bottle of Old Crow,
back and forth, after a day of truck stop coffee,
and now only twenty miles to go.

So, you just Zen out and dial down a little.
Sometimes, when the universe says pull over,

you do it.

 

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