Hangin’ Out at the Git and Go, poetry by Jason Ryberg

Hangin’ Out at the Git and Go

The moon tonight is
the lone, pink sodi­um street
light of one more no

name, gas sta­tion / grain
ele­va­tor town with no
bar, no din­er, no

movie the­ater
(since 1980-something),
noth­ing to do on

a Fri­day or a
Sat­ur­day night but get in-
to trou­ble in some

oth­er town the next
coun­ty over, or hang out
here, at the Git and

Go, and watch a few
cars pass­ing through; some­times some
out­ta town types pull

in to gas up and
walk around a while, stretching
and jok­ing, asking

them­selves, each other
and, final­ly, one of us
where the hell are we?

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 Redand 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.