Thrush Poetry Journal
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Sara Ryan
​

​Grasp 
 
I learn the word for willow tree.
I learn the word for howl and keep
 
it in my throat. the word for wolf
curls underneath my tongue. I have
 
studied pain this way—tucking it
into the folds of my body where
 
darkness settles. I wonder about
the waking. the sunsplit
 
morning burns into orange peel—​
dappled heat. an extinct
 
volcano comes back to life
but we aren’t told how we know
 
the mountain has begun to stir. how
stone yawns and spins hot into
 
the world again. I wish that I could
say that I saved the mourning dove,
 
but I can’t be sure. every bird dies
a death—falls from the sky and
 
sleeps. it is hard to banish this thought—​
that everything wakes up and waits
 
for living. for the word that names
the blue color of a pale vein.
 
who wouldn’t want to wake an ancient
thing from the deepest sleep? who
 
wouldn’t want to dig and find the still-wet
blood of a long-dead fawn? a miracle,
 
maybe, how the earth shudders beneath
us. how we dance along the fractures.




Sara Ryan is the author of the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). She was the winner of the 2018 Grist Pro Forma Contest, and her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Booth, Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain and others. She is currently pursuing her PhD at Texas Tech University.




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