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.