Sara Ryan
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what I forgot to say was that I never gave it a chance. that I let myself get so alone I couldn’t imagine anything else. it was too late for hope. too late to remember the touch I dreamt of. the dreams became everything. every hair lifting from my arms. every shiver along my skin. what I meant to say is that I never meant it—I lied about wanting to find something in the quiet. and then Texas opened up and swallowed me whole. I got lost in a canyon and could only hear my echo. rock sliced into slivers of ochre and rust. walls grew higher around me as I ventured deeper into the earth’s incision. I never did enough for the strawberry moon. I never listened for the rogue coyote running through cotton. instead, I crystallized in my living room. I became what I never wished for: a river in the desert, drying into a trickle of blue. |
Sara Ryan is the author of I Thought There Would Be More Wolves (University of Alaska Press), as well as the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). In 2018, she won Grist's Pro Forma Contest and Cutbank's Big Sky, Small Prose Contest. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Diode, Brevity, Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, Thrush, and others. She is currently a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.