I’m Through by Sara Ryan

 

I’m through with memory

and everything that was before. each day,

 

I am more permanently in the speckled

 

light of the afternoon. the obscurant

dust swarms with moths. the ink-black

 

beetles crawl up the sink drain and settle

 

on the porcelain to lick rust. liar, liar—

how could you believe in a dying

 

tree, the carved-out lot where a house

 

once was. who told you I was listening

for brick-heavy words in the corners

 

of your mouth, for shed feathers collecting

 

in highway underpasses. just once, I want

to tally my losses: the number of birds

 

living in my car vents, how many pages

 

dissolve to ash and spine. promise me

you will go ahead into ochre rocks, rivers

 

that lick at your knees, and not look back.

 

that you will climb into the sky because

it is beautiful. I feel my throat fill

 

with mineral grief until it evaporates

 

into hollow. when I think of dying, I think

of gravity dragging dust across the plains.


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, EcoTheo, and others. She is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.


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