Sean Rys: We Who Say Thank You Often Mean Goodbye
Prior to blindness an aggregate light enters the eyes
irregular spindle a sense of the thing itself in the apparatus
halogen rinsed like any room’s morbidness finally revealed
a ripcord a red waning &all we were was all
mixed up in the fact of your speaking fragile reed
the moon: no arbiter of loneliness no chokethief
no politician’s word for a secreted drowning then wished for
your hands arrived an event of whiteness
though sequence is not memory nor is a prayer for the possibility of
ghost luck white gown on a hangar skin suit for any clown
to climb out of measure of loss where watchmen to sleep
three orderlies sang to you sickness
a kind of frequency henceforth mimetic as in the schism
between wound & world: wings
This Too Will Be Welcomed as Art in an Era of Unloved Machines
Things forgotten & things left to suffer. Pennaceous things. Things misproportioned. Things waxing or things waning. Things settled between friends with a handshake. Things beaked, hooked, or handle-barred. Things thought to be tragic but found lacking. Things in the night that bring us, unclothed, to terror. Things nameless. Things habit compels us toward. Things in the shop window shaken by light. Things we could not bring into being. Things promised & soon after displaced. Things understood by the body if not by the movements of that body between rooms. Things actualized. Things without consequence. Things longed for & found in chance intersections. Things torn by the fingers & flung upward. Things ahistorical. Things cornered & cut open & things cobbled too quickly together. Things circumstantial. Things selfish for having failed. Things wounded & things wearing another thing’s sadness, softly & without colatitude. Things wanting to be wanted. Things you did not know at the time but how could you have. Things in the closet, their flesh parts showing. Things—darkness, darkness— you make complicit.
SEAN RYS lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he teaches composition and creative writing at the University of Arizona. His work has previously appeared in the journals elimae, DIAGRAM, and Indiana Review, and is forthcoming in The International Literary Quarterly.
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