Devil’s Lake

Fall 2013 Issue

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.

a photo of the author, Sean Rys 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. More from this issue >