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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