Tag: poetry

She Named the Stars Out Loud

We pulled off somewhere
past the edge of signal,
dust curling like smoke
behind the tyres.

She climbed the bonnet barefoot,
leaned back with a bottle of water
and a grin
like she’d stolen it from a god.

Said she used to be
an astrologer.
Said Orion was her first crush
and she still wrote him letters
when it rained.

I told her I didn’t believe in fate.
She said,
“Good.
The sky doesn’t care
what you believe.”

She pointed—
Scorpius.
Crux.
Something I can’t pronounce
but still dream about.

I kissed her
somewhere between Mars and regret.
She tasted like dust
and the end of something beautiful.

By morning,
the sky was empty
and so was the seat beside me.

I still look up
hoping to find
whatever she saw in the dark.

Ryan Stone

This poem appears in my latest collection:

Shady Ladies and Bourbon Highways

Available for kindle from Amazon Australia here or Amazon US here.

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Shaping a Poem

It’s a quiet thing, a word found
in the stillness of dawn
while dreamers slumber
and the new moon succumbs
to day. A fading thought,
soft intake of breath
in the long pause

between sleep and wake.
Sometimes it’s hope
enduring wildfire, flood,
or the dusts of time.
Maybe dinosaur bones,
a lost tomb, or scarecrows
guarding lavender fields.

Perhaps a dew-drizzled
cobweb, a jonquil, cloud
or song. Most often
it’s your breath,
soft and steady,
promising one more day
in which I will belong.

Ryan Stone

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From the Sidelines

Do you know how it feels
to stand alone in a forest
in the caesura
of a gathering storm?

With a graceful pirouette
the north wind about-faces
and just as quickly
a sou’ wester replaces
the breathy, dry kisses
of long afternoons in the sun.
Drawing breath from your lungs
and heat from your soles,
lowercase twisters
scatter leaves with abandon.
There’s a pause,

it is electric,
then thunder above.
A first splash, the herald,
caresses your skin
and whispers of days
when you sucked the air in
and laughed until laughter ran dry;
when you danced and you sang
and timeless, you lay
entwined ‘neath an indigo sky.

In that place, alone,
your lenses will fail
and your notebook fall
by the by.
Your shutter can’t capture
the depths of magenta;
your pen,
the dreaming Magpie.

It’s a moment,
just a moment,
before the storm breaks
and the old song
resumes its same rhyme.

Do you feel it?
Can you grab it?
A resolution, of sorts:
to wring from
each minute
a lifetime.

by Ryan Stone

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215

Falling Up

You will never fall in love with me.
Don’t try to convince me
That I will always wait for you.
If you really look, you’ll see
I’m not here for the long haul
Don’t imagine
You give me reason to stay.
When things get hard I’ll leave –
Don’t imagine
I’m not like the others,
Goodbye.
I’ll never say
I love you.

(Now read from bottom to top)

Ryan Stone

Click here for audio

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319

The Weight of Lost Things

Friends, a quiet note to say my first poetry collection is now out in the world.
The Weight of Lost Things gathers the red-dust roads, dogs, and crows that have followed me for years and sets them loose on the page.

If you’d like to read along, you can find the book here:

👉 The Weight of Lost Things – Amazon AU

Thanks for walking this road with me.

— Ryan

Set against the dry pulse of the Australian outback, these poems chart the fractured terrain of boyhood, brutality, young love, and the loyalty of dogs. Fathers vanish, mothers soften, dogs die, and the land never forgives. With language as lean as the paddocks it describes, this book explores what gets buried, what remains unspoken, and the quiet ache of staying when there’s nowhere left to go.

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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.

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162

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

Click here for audio

First published in Writers’ Forum Magazine issue 163, April 2015 – first place

154

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

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