SARA RYAN
Ill Wind
let’s face it: I’m scared. my beautiful
young body turns into a haunted
house. I write sweet letters and light
them on fire. I am nothing but animal.
a one-eyed owl. I wish I had hated you,
but the truth is that you were a road
I knew well. driven with my eyes shut.
you took my hand and led me to the edge
of a cliff. my throat dry and thirsting.
the wind whipped through me like
a wild storm. I stared from the precipice
and into the dark. I was once the girl
I dreamt of: all that verve bundled
in my blood and skin. now I know
how it feels. to keep running until I die.
until we separate and get further apart.
can you understand me? even a little?
it feels like I am in an endless echo.
talking to the maps and the men inside
them on all that land. in all those canyons
and rivers and cities, tall and lit up.
anyway, the dawn comes and everything
is grey. everything is a reservoir.
I crawl out of the deep, a faceless girl.
Sara Ryan is the author of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves (University of Alaska Press), as well as the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). In 2018, she won Grist’s Pro Forma Contest and Cutbank’s Big Sky, Small Prose Contest. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Brevity, Kenyon Review, Diode, Thrush Poetry Journal and others. She is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.