Michael Ryan Poems

When did I learn the word "I"?
What a mistake. For some,
it may be a placeholder,
for me it's a contagion.
...

At four o'clock it's dark.
Today, looking out through dusk
at three gray women in stretch slacks
chatting in front of the post office,
...

The ward beds float like ghost ships
in the darkness, the nightlight
above my bed I pretend is a lighthouse
with a little man inside who wears
...

They slept and ate like us.
Feral they were not.
The intricacy of their handiwork
bespoke a fineness we'd be taught.
...

The love we've defined for ourselves
in privacy, in suffering,
keeps both of us lonely as a fist,
but does intimacy mean a happy ending?
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What kind of delusion are you under?
The life he hid just knocked you flat.
You see the lightning but not the thunder.
...

Most of the past is lost,
and I'm glad mine has vanished
into blackness or space or whatever nowhere
what we feel and do goes,
...

On the day a fourteen-year-old disappeared in Ojai, California,
having left a Christmas Eve slumber party barefoot
to "go with a guy" in a green truck,
...

They're all dressed up in carmine
floor-length velvet gowns, their upswirled hair
festooned with matching ribbons:
their fresh hopes and our fond hopes for them
...

From embarrassment, I made statements.
My icons—tight caves and mouths—stuck together
briefly like dry lips, like a lover's insults.
The fact is they were ugly to all of us.
...