I Thought There Would Be More Wolves

Poems

Sara Ryan

• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781602234499
• eBook ISBN:
  9781602234505
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

After moving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, poet Sara Ryan found herself immersed in the isolated spaces of the North: the cold places that never thawed, the bleak expanses of snow. These poems have teeth, bones, and blood—they clack and bruise and make loud sounds. They interrogate self-preservation, familial history, extinction, taxidermy, and animal and female bodies. In between these lines, in warm places where blood collects, animals stay hidden and hunted, a girl looks loneliness dead in the eye, and wolves come out of the woods to run across the frozen water of Lake Superior.

III

There is a girl inside.

She is randy as a wolf.

—Lucille Clifton

Wolf Question

let’s remember the hollowness

inside. what once took her blood and grew.

on Isle Royale on Lake Superior, wolves

dance with moose and try to live

through the winter. fifty wolves

slowly becomes two. the wolves die. we forget them.

and her hands chafe and crack.

she loses no daughters and loves

nothing that will hurt or kill

her. when she moved to the Upper

Peninsula, she thought there would

be more wolves. she never sees one.

In Praise of the Exoskeleton

the ability to stay entirely untouched.

unscavenged. unhaunted by the other

bodies inside your own. once, pavement

split me right down the middle. I learned

my blood and its spread. the lengths

my skin went to in its healing. the way I lost

and lost and came back—bright. pink. new.

when men tell me what to think of my body,

I pull my bones around me like a slick jacket

of white. harder this way. rigid and resistant.

ready for rocks. there are mechanics to this

method. to becoming a shell and staying soft

underneath. there’s failure, too. in the scales

I develop in direct sunlight. in the cracks

that let the light in. the superglue that won’t hold

me. the doctor told me I will never grow taller

and I said, that’s fine. people always see me

as taller than I am. I am elastic energy.

when you’re not looking, I am a swarm of locusts.

when you touch me, it sounds like thunder.

Parenthood

when I see the small bead

of blood on my cat’s nose

I am shocked and I don’t know

why because I know what she

is made of. her blood and

fur and redness and bone.

but the way her skin

opened up to claw. the blood

dripping on the carpet. my other

cat snarling from the wingback

chair. her teeth sharp and

white and taking over her

sweet face. how the little

animal body puffs up with

hate, with sound and low

rumbling noises. my human

skin buckling, too. all that

blood churning underneath.

Extinct

the Eyewitness Book of fossils and the lost skeleton

invertebrates and spine and the footprint of

the mummified frog. the horse tooth.

banded flint. problematica— what cannot be classified

in a series of bone. amber and soft sediment. most

years, I am thankful to be seen. the favorable

circumstance of disappearance. memory is

a man I do not know. not a soft soil I have

tasted under my tongue. today, it is the pounding

of a nail. the sweet breath of a bat. a hummingbird.

please, I need you to be conifer wood. ringlets of

growth and height. the fossilized sequoia and all the

redwoods and the dawn. at once. be the black

gold of an oil slick. be a bone museum

on the beach of a desert. be eating the sun.

Cuffing Season

see “urge,” see “how to know if something has bitten you.”

wait for the cold to come. wait until your bed is glacial enough

to take the down blanket out of the closet. your friend

laughs and says it’s cuffing season but she really wants to say:

any love you feel right now isn’t love, but a yearning

for warmth. remember what you looked like at twenty-one.

you were so different then. so hopeful. unsure of your shoulders.

you were nothing. you were wanting for winter. for snow.

everything in the before. you left the dead behind and knew it. left

everything to wolves. you believed in no one. you were young.

you had plenty of time. you went west. you let your car run into rust.

you looked back and laughed when the wind called your name.

now, you convince yourself you know this place—you name it an animal.

softness beneath your feet. large empty sounds carved from the air.

the plateau stretches out forever. like metal—dull sheets of gold.

you remember the trees more than anything. the shade. the shadows

they threw across the earth. rocks, wilds, and woods. your body

shoved into fog. between the barn and trees and brooks and birds.

this is the river where your love died. when you burned it, the fire

curled up. your mouth was open and warm. you were so different then.

The Lizard That Lived Forever

I hate to say that I dream about men, but I do. about men who have gone off and married other girls. moved to other colonial houses in Virginia. it is like strapping the tree branch to my bicycle and riding until I become concrete.

*

Monday drew a circle around me and lit it on fire. Wednesday learned my name and spit it onto my lap.

*

I scrub an opal earring with a wire brush and it turns to gold in my hands. I have dug it out of a dead woman’s pink jewelry box. I was born in October, and I feel like I need to polish all of the opals that ever existed.

*

this morning, a man walks into the store where I work ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Self-Portrait as Mammal
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author