Ryleigh Wann
As a long-time fan of Ryleigh Wann’s work, I am excited to have two of her poems grace our inaugural poetry issue.
Wann’s poetry drips with ecstasy and grief. It begs the reader to live in the beautiful grit, inviting them to games of strip poker, porch smokes, and truck stop diners. Despite the delight of her diction, though, her constructed worlds don’t exist without ache. In her poem “Cataloguing,” Wann takes the reader through an inventory of loss. In “Portrait with Rolled Cigarettes in an Altoids Tin,” loss is a woman: “I called her a God/send, wizard, meine Liebchen.”
Wann is her own god of words and form, and I am ecstatic to share these poems with our readers.
-Emily
Cataloguing
The first place I got high was at Andie’s house, fifteen, buying weed from a senior with a Mustang. He rolled a blunt and drove around and when he dropped us off after he pulled my arm and asked me to stay, said my big teeth were pretty and my lips matched, told me to suck him off and I pretended to know how, found my inner wolf-woman and let the mouth foam flood any shame. The second place I got high was in a bedroom that belonged to a girl who died last summer. Why write about it now? The first place I drank cough syrup was at Andie’s boyfriend’s apartment, sixteen. The Styrofoam cup blurred in my hands as we drove to a truckstop diner and Andie napped it off in the booth. I don’t remember the first place I did coke, it just materialized, always in my pocket or purse at every bar or party or casual first date, waiting to be scooped up with my house key. Lindsey OD’d and Jessie OD’d and Andie was there the first place someone asked permission to get high at a bonfire when we were nineteen. I said sure, the smell of weed doesn’t bother me, but he was already tugging his belt through the loops and pulling out a spoon and I didn’t know what else to do but look up at the dark, still sky and watch the stars glint in their fervor. The first place he and I got high together was on his couch and there was that same spoon and he couldn’t look at me after. He couldn’t look at anything at all, his eyes two broken clocks winding backward. The last place I got high was in Andie’s parents’ driveway, prepping for her funeral reception. I will find her wherever I go.
Portrait with Rolled Cigarettes in an Altoids Tin
Rat queen, wrath-machine, bitch Goddess
is what she called me. I called her a God
send, wizard, meine Liebchen.
She was a spectacle, spectacular at losing
strip poker—all navy bra and Jack ‘n Coke,
goddamn it said to me before a name.
She told me Plath said Hughes
had a voice that thundered like God
and if that’s true, then women are heat-lightning:
silent flashes of lilac in my
blackberry sky, unexpected and ethereal
before a storm rolls in.
In the summer we’d smoke darts
under porch light, share pretzels
and analyze plays.
Her favorite was “Waiting for Godot”
and mine, “A Fool for Love.”
It’s been years since then.
When I missed her funeral
I started considering God, considering
the possibility of seeing her again
or hearing her frothing voice in the morning
hum heyyy, lady. A voice I loved.
A voice I can hear less and less these days.
Ryleigh Wann (she/her) hails from Michigan and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She earned an MFA in poetry from UNC-Wilmington where she taught creative writing and served as the comics editor for Ecotone. Her writing can be found in HAD, The McNeese Review, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere.
Follow her on Twitter or check out more of her work here.