Even polar, we graft together.
I wrench my neck to sky.

What grey. These are my
articles of faith: the land

conceiving food to feed
our child. I’m a simple

nun to that. We’ve no memory
of thaw, but still we haul our scraps

outside, sure with all our might
of resurrection. I fear the empty

belly; the fashioned
seed; the kiwi flown in

from half a world away.
Sometimes my mind

needs a bed under snow. O
Love, tell me nothing but stories

of nothing. I’m so pretty
& there are eagles

at the river. There’s not
a thing like them, nothing.

*

Aubrey Ryan’s work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Ant-, Best New Poets, El Aleph, Phantom Limb, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Her poems have received awards from The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Consequence Magazine, Booth Journal, and Tupelo Press, and have been nominated for three Pushcart prizes. Aubrey is the Writer in Residence at the Midwest Writing Center in Iowa where she lives with her husband and small son.