Ashley Danielle Ryle
Assume you could wake tomorrow and feel something
other than momentous grief, do that one-foot-then-the-other thing.
Get this down: take the next small boat and call it a packet.
Across the water and up the next hill: Roman candles, finale cannons
just above the tree line. The ripping launches echo against
the descending cliff, tight as a great room and you shouting in it.
Yes, my entire body still reverberates when you read some sexy part
of the myth: his well-proportioned limbs, the smooth soles of his feet.
I lost someone this year; by grace, it wasn’t you.
Ashley Danielle Ryle
Ashley Danielle Ryle's work has most recently appeared in Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, Iron Horse Review, and MidAmerican Review and online at Upstart. Her chapbook, Fetching My Sister, is with Dancing Girl Press, and she was a recipient of a brief residency through the Kentucky Foundation for Women in 2014. She earned her MFA in 2011 from West Virginia University. She currently resides with her husband in central Pennsylvania while pursuing a PhD in materials and grammars sixteenth and seventeenth century women’s life-writing.