Lisa Ryan

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 7 years, 9 months ago

    Then I Returned to the House of the Slow Letting Go
     
    I went out into the evening,
    walked alone with my clippers
    to dead-head the marigolds
    the peonies, no longer spinning planets,
    and the now brown-leafed […]

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 7 years, 9 months ago

    Links of Ladder
     
    Higher than a hired man’s head,
    a chain bubbles from the tree’s heart
    and falling thirteen links, dares
    a boy’s reaching, his pretending—
    its original purpose unknown.
    It is not a hanging […]

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 7 years, 9 months ago

    The Paperboy Sees No Wonder in It—
    the Snow Giving off the Only Light at 6 AM
     
    The boy could have lived forever
    sliding down a hill, after watching cartoons.
    Now the only cartoon is himself fa […]

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 7 years, 9 months ago

    losing the word
     
    what is prayer

    but our limbic words
    offered
    to an uncertain
    trajectory,

    the cave images
    given language
    from our dark cities.

    i remember your prayer
    outside memphis
    whispered […]

  • Lisa Ryan's profile was updated 7 years, 9 months ago

  • Lisa Ryan changed their profile picture 7 years, 9 months ago

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 7 years, 9 months ago

    3rd place winner of the Streetlight 2015 Poetry Contest.

    Flowers in a Crystal Vase – Manet, 1882
     
    At the members only showing
    of flower paintings, we old folks
    dress for comfort. Women in flats
    and bo […]

  • We Always Called Him Fletcher
     
    Never by his first name Albert, or Mr. Fletcher.
    He was tall as a sugar pine, skin the color

    of freckled walnuts, walked our whole
    neighborhood hauling

    an extension […]

  • The Sheets Pulled Over
     
    When one thinks in love about love,
    he’s doing what he shouldn’t. He will get it wrong.

    What if everything were revealed?
    The apples and milk on your mind

    when we lay down in W […]

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 8 years, 2 months ago

    Smoke
    —translated from Theophile Gautier’s Emaux et Cemées, 1852-1872
     
    Down there, under sheltering trees:
    A hunchbacked hovel of the poor—
    Walls crumbling; roof down on its knees.
    Moss blots the thres […]

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 8 years, 5 months ago

    2nd place winner of the Streetlight 2015 Poetry Contest.

    Rubble
     
    The water found a home in our wreckage.
                     Our city, once a bastion of high times—
          colored lights on strings, avenue […]

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 8 years, 5 months ago

    1st place winner of the Streetlight 2015 Poetry Contest.

    Hum
     
    Out of the blue,
    he gave her a recording.
    She thought there was something
    wrong with it, but they had only
    slept together once,
    she […]

  • In His Own Right
    A conversation with U.S. Poet Laureate and Charlottesville resident Charles Wright
    What the city of Charlottesville, Virginia lacks in size it makes up for in culture. You won’t go ten minutes w […]

  • Phone Sex in Three Acts
     
    Act I.

    There is nothing noble about having phone sex
    with your ex-girlfriend
    in the bathroom of a friend’s apartment.

    The shower curtain looks offended.
    Tile ashamed to to […]

  • A Wild Thing And A Tended One
     
    We can talk about these corduroy
    pillows and how I want to shoot

    marbles with the ball joint
    of your right shoulder. Last time

    I tried to tell you about the guy
    who came […]

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 9 years, 2 months ago

    I’m creatively constipated. That’s right, all input and no output. Binging on poetry, nothing to show at writing group. Forget the fifth round of revisions on that damn poem that won’t cooperate. Not in […]

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 9 years, 3 months ago

    A good friend and fellow writer recently introduced me to Medium. NOT the dead-people-seeing-housewife tv show. Medium is a digital publishing platform/story-telling community for writers to eng […]

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 9 years, 7 months ago

    On August 7-10, I had the privilege of attending the Virginia Quarterly Review’s first writers’ conference, along with roughly 25-30 participants, at the Boar’s Head Inn right here in Charlottesville, VA. Three […]

  • Lisa Ryan wrote a new post 9 years, 8 months ago

    In high school I was an associate editor for our school’s art and lit magazine, Pen & Ink. We’d meet weekly to review submissions under the tutelage of our faculty advisor, whose love and gift for teaching English […]

  • Charlottesville, Virginia, where Streetlight operates from, is full of Ph.D candidates, post-docs and masters students, thanks to Mr. Jefferson’s University. Amid all the academic types, a person without some […]

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