too much coffee, too little sleep, a love of words…
It wasn’t a spectacular leaf:
rather drab, too long from tree.
Yet, the life it clutched
in its five trembling points
turned my strides into steps
into stasis. I watched
as it danced,
sucking more from a gust
than nearby leaves
better suited to flying.
It spiraled away
to a lazuline sky
while I remained rooted;
going nowhere.
Ryan Stone
One drunken night, he lay on the coach road
and she lay beside him. He pictured a truck
descending–wobbling around corners,
gaining momentum. They spoke about crushes,
first kisses. He told her of an older woman
who’d stolen a thing he couldn’t replace.
He tried to describe the weight of lost things.
She listened until he stopped,
until I stopped
hiding behind he. I felt small,
watching the cosmos churn
while I lay on the coach road
one summer night,
speaking of big things
and nothing.
Ryan Stone
first published at Algebra of Owls, November 2016
Republished for dVerse poetics – Poems That Could Save Your Life – this friendship saved mine.
Until I saw those wasted hands,
brittle as chalk, I hadn’t thought
how fast the years make ghosts.
I heard them once called brawler’s paws.
For me, they were always more:
cobras, poised to strike.
But his brawling days are gone now;
I could kill him with a pillow,
if I cared enough to try.
Thin sheets press tightly to a bed
more empty than full, his body broken
like the promises of childhood.
Haunted eyes betray last thoughts
of a dim path, spiralling down.
He hopes to make amends.
“Forgiven?” he croaks,
barely there, as always,
and I’m wishing that I wasn’t.
With the last rays of day as witness,
I turn my back with purpose
and hear the silence roar.
In a late-night bar I catch my reflection
swimming in a glass of bourbon;
but I’m staring at a ghost.
Ryan Stone
First published in Writers’ Forum Magazine issue 163, April 2015 – first place
Birds don’t stop in this town.
I see them fly past, black peppering
blue, going someplace. I’ve given up
dreaming wings. This town
will know my bones. Condoms
sell well in Joe’s corner store – boredom breeds
but breeding’s a trap, a twitch in the smile
of those steel-eyed shrews
who linger late after church.
I walked half a day, out past the salt flats,
after they closed the movie house down. Smoked
the joint she’d brought back from college
when she returned to bury my dad.
I remember how pale her fingers lay
across my father’s hands –
coal miner’s hands, tarred like his lungs;
like this town.
Ryan Stone
First published in Eunoia Review, July 2016.
Winner of the Goodreads Monthly Poetry Contest, August 2016.
First Place in Poetry Nook contest 101, November 2016.
Chasing after leaves
Tossed by small summer twisters
To be a puppy
Ryan Stone
A brief romance ends
Breath swept away on the wind
Bound for distant squalls
Ryan Stone
The candle burns low
I read while you doze, outside
The wind and the world
Ryan Stone
Cooling on the porch
Dragonflies in silhouette
Short night, summer moon
Ryan Stone
Your flame flickers briefly—
a parting whisper.
Some trick of the river
mimics your laughter.
We stand apart at sunset,
lost in natsukashii,
come together in darkness,
to watch the dead pass on.
Your light has fallen now
to shadow
beneath the bridge.
Ryan Stone
First published on Napalm and Novocain, January 2016
Published at Poetry Nook, October 2018, Nominated for 2018 Pushcart Prize
This is the summer of red dust. Everything
sucked dry—hollow as cicada husks, wedged
under eaves and porch stairs—waiting
for a wind change. On the road out of town,
empty grain silos loom, perched like headstones
over wheat-field graves. Harvesters sag, tyres
cracked like the asphalt. Rotting carcasses
litter riverless beds—tongues swollen,
flyblown, unslaked. First, a wheeze,
then my pickup spews steam. It dies in a ditch
under a burnt-orange sun. Tiger snake chunks
graffiti the hood’s underside, one blind eye bulging
from the torn head. It must have sought shade
or wiper water—sliding up from the parched earth
miles back. Now it’s just one more dead thing
in a land of dead things. This is the summer
of red dust. It swirls and the road ahead blurs.
– Ryan Stone
first published by Eunoia Review
days of stone 
