Ryan Little is a high school English and creative writing teacher who has recently rediscovered an inspiration to write poems. Ryan lives in Sacramento, CA, with partner Amy and seventeen semi-healthy houseplants.
Poetry winner of the 2020 Prose & Poetry Contest selected by guest judge Roy G. Guzmán.
Where do I put it before I go to bed?
(I have some empty cupboards now.)
I’ve been holding its sharp-edged exquisite foot-thick glass
and I think it’s dripping something.
I smell it and it’s beautiful and it’s burning
like a wren’s cremation in lilac. I eat it
and feel a rat walking with its poison in my head.
I see it everywhere. It twirls the purple sky
as I drive asleep to work. It is on my skin
and it’s in the rain and it drags
through the holes of my umbrella. It is in my mirror.
I hear it there too I hear it in my lungs wailing
like a last-chance child in a sunrise storm of ash and blight
and the cindered glass of you being gone.
So, gently, I’ll lay your lack in this wind
that’s peeling up the salted land from that old ocean of us
soaring it skyward, almost sweetly, toward the sun afire and alone.
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