The days unfold
like maps. Fresh dirt
in the garden, black
as cake, grows warm.
...
I walk home through the city.
The stars wait behind the clouds
like an orchestra for a conductor
and windows yawn open
...
The songbird that escapes
from a burning house
will build its nest
in the shape of a cage.
...
A still night has its own cruel music:
the catch of bridge cables plucked
by stone-scented wind; the low, bent
hum of the Delaware, rippling like a singing saw.
...
Peel an orange, set
a candle in the rind-
let the smoke melt
the pith into an oil
...
Ryan Teitman was born in Philadelphia and is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He received his BA from Penn State University and worked as a newspaper reporter in and around Philadelphia before receiving an MFA and MA from Indiana University. His poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, and Washington Square, among other publications.)
Another Country
The days unfold
like maps. Fresh dirt
in the garden, black
as cake, grows warm.
The roses perform
a silent recital,
each playing its part
from memory. I wait
for my father the way
men wait for a train.
I wait for my father
the way a dancer
waits for music.
My mother is a curtain
in the window.
She calls me in
to fit my shadow
for a suit. I keep still
as she pinches the tape
around its wrist.
Around her neck
my mother's pearls
clink like teeth.
Your shadow grows
faster than you do,
she says. She says
that waiting is
a kind of dancing.
At night I dance
with the stillness.
My blood waits
behind my chest
like a man behind
a locked door.
My father waits
in another country.