#aubrey ryan

[sthravens]

[m0iety-blog]

Bodily. By kelp & wakame. By small, oily fish. To save an ocean, we will leave it. To save our ground, we’re planting bluestem, then burning. Being woman, I know to shed, to go toward new moon like underground room. Come out fetal & drumming. I swallow herds. I swallow the sun, & if a child is female she carries all her thousand eggs inside her mother & the mother carries double all those oaths: I will be razed for you & then you’ll burn me to ground. You are the ground & I’m growing giant & sunward.

"The Way We Swear It" by Aubrey Ryan

[atmoonrise]

The Feast at the End of the World

I’ve been unmade—a jar of weeviled flour and the dust-storm husk of beans. Feed grain. Ethanol. My land is a warlord. My land is strip: mine and mall. Lord, just give me cow shit and cover crop, and I’ll be a beet beneath the beet red sun. I’ll be a fat root, knifing the dark and dread-locked with loam. Give me a hive, a drone, a queen. Boards from a red, rotten barn. When the doors shut down. When the shelves are clean lines like beautiful mouths, let me be bright as a buck hunted down. We’re only bone and a wild rise of bread. Holy blood, holy tongue. We crack so fast, then blaze like eggs. We blaze. We feed the young.

[ecstasis]

Tinder in a Time of Burning

I’m eight at the beginning, and it’s always the beginning:           somewhere, silos daisy-ringed with guards. One night, my father comes home with the father           from the next farm down the road, and they sit. Dark cups and the other man’s smoke. Shoulders           like the haunches of huge, white bulls. My mother’s fears: government men and babies gone breech;           the pigs my father lets roam in the woods, so in official records there are no pigs; the joy in his voice as he           calls them home is a flare gun, is a circus cannon. The men fear someday knowing the sound of women           dying. They hunch across our lazy susan, voices a hum of tones I’d hear behind my parent’s bedroom door: a low,           old language, and the next day, changed. My mother with her face a blaze of morning. My father, quiet:           the world. The world, devoured. Aubrey Ryan

[hypocrite-lecteur]

At the end of the world, the sky is a pot of dishwater. The sun is so tired. Sam dares Lulu to blow the sun out--just the breeze from her whistle would do it. He nuzzles her neck and says: you could whistle down the sun, O Baby Lu.

Aubrey Ryan, from "Sam and Lulu at the Very End of the World"