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Ryder Allen-Bruns Poem
A room flickers under a
nearly dead bulb.
The mattress keeps the deep impression of a body,
cold air stealing whatever heat was left as I pull back under the covers.
By morning, the shirt
has borrowed the room’s smell.
A half-filled glass leaves a ring near the door.
An unread book sits open on its face,
cracked open the width of a penny.
The window, latch half turned,
hand curled but not closed.
Morning again, to the same failing light.
I thought the room
would keep its scent for good.
Instead I find it
folded into the shirt,
into nothing.
Copyright © Ryder Allen-Bruns | Year Posted 2026
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Details |
Ryder Allen-Bruns Poem
Her feet crush the coarse dirt,
settling from foot to foot in approach.
Tendons flex; bones remember weather.
Wings—thin bone, taut skin—rise,
each feather catching a gale it cannot see the end of.
The body lunges.
Wings propel upward as a single draft is caught.
Legs lock into a streamlined stance,
and the body relaxes, gliding on years to come.
The dirt seems never to have existed;
storm gales he dark sea below.
Flying spray and rising mist crust her beak with salt.
Endless currents shepherd the locked wings through thick fog.
Half in repose,
sweeping the air—never too high, never too low.
She has always been this far from land, and never.
Seasons crust her wings like old weather she can’t shed.
Then the wind snaps. A warning.
Wings unfold.
A wall of petrichor and sulfur rises ahead.
Feathers shudder.
Tendons unlock. Her body loosens.
Feet strike giving soil,
legs search for footing as friction returns.
Salt gives way to soil.
The dirt is dirt again.
Copyright © Ryder Allen-Bruns | Year Posted 2026
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