Ryan Van Winkle Poems

An incompleteness ago:
my fingers and turpentine nails,
laser hairs standing cold.
The market of twilight,
...

"I think the sea is a useless teacher"
Marie Howe, From Nowhere


How I
looked towards
...

Flies land on her wrist, legs, the tips of her eyes
remind us we are alive. "Go find something dead,"
she says. And the sun is here for us, the wind
...

We dreamed and a bird flew
into our bedroom window

like a heavy book
dropped in the dark.
...

YELLOW ROOM

For two years
it was a bare light bulb
by the side of the bed.
...

Furniture, photos,
petals floating in water.

It was spring and the river
bloomed and rose.
...

I have known summers
where rain would come cool
as the underside of a pillow. Worms
would leave dusty chambers
...

October, still
the west is open.

Tonight sleep. Tomorrow
wake and still the west.
...

sits up with me when the power cuts,
tells about the trout at Unkee's Lake,

the wood house burned on the hill.
He says he was intimate with every
...

a world quiet as black
and white and warm
as an ironed collar. So,
I want to say sorry
...