River Stone
Choke Town
The butcher’s sign still swings,
though the shop’s been gutted
since Gaz ran a hose from the tailpipe
and left the lights on.
The school gate’s rusted open.
Wind sifts chalk dust
through cracked windows
where names once lined the roll
like prayers in hell.
Down at the silo,
kids mainline in the shadow
of grain that never came.
One girl carved a star
into her thigh—
the first scar
she chose.
The creek runs red when it rains.
No fish, no frogs,
no reason left to lie.
Dogs roam in threes.
Cattle follow fence lines
out of habit, not hope.
Even the sky
hangs lower than it used to,
like it’s tired
of watching us fail.
Mothers drink in sheds.
Fathers forget birthdays.
The baker feeds birds
because they still show up.
And under the rot
of pubs, paddocks
and cracked hope,
the town exhales.
Shallow and slow.
Waiting for someone
to mumble last rites.
Ryan Stone
Paw Print
Years since—
his bowl gone,
yard grown over,
collar hanging
unused.
This morning,
cleaning the window,
I found it—
one print,
low in the corner,
half lost to light.
It floored me.
Solid.
Sure.
The weight of him
in a single mark.
I stood
cloth in hand,
his breath
suddenly in the room.
Didn’t wipe it.
Didn’t move.
Just watched
as the sun warmed the glass
and brought him
loping back
through the yard
and the years.
Ryan Stone
Coal Town
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.
Unburied Hatchet
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
Dissembling
captive cicada,
rattling terrible music
in the granite hill
Ryan Stone
Drought Town
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
Tōrō Nagashi
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
days of stone 
