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I promised a couple of months ago, to post Ryan Van Winkle’s poem and this is how slow I am! I blame my transcontinental lifestyle and flying between Australia and the UK twice in six weeks. But I am settled into the new year now, and although newly married and not personally struggling with cohabitation, l did love listening to Ryan read this when I was in Glasgow in late November, my new Edinburgh/American poet-friend. The poem I asked for was about toast, but it’s already been published elsewhere, so he has generously allowed me to reproduce ‘The Apartment’.

However…the stanzas in the version Ryan sent me were alternating tabulations across the page of mostly four lines each and I have tried eight times to not only reproduce the tabulations but to just put the stanza breaks in, but this blog will simply not let me add spaces between stanzas (though I have done it before and have no idea how I did!). This is a frustrated poet this morning…Ryan I’m very sorry because all the stanzas have been run on together.

If anybody knows how to better reproduce poems on these blogs, I’d appreciate any tips…

The Apartment

Our new walls,

empty in the dusk,

hang like sheets

before first light.

There is a driven nail

by the stove that could

hold a pan if the walls

stay sturdy. And the

old tenants left a mirror in the

bedroom which looks back at

staring walls with fine cracks

like a museum’s basement vase.

There are brown smears

in the study; chocolate, blood

or shit, we don’t know what

will happen to us here or what

will settle on rented walls

or if nothing will settle

at all. We’ve just moved

and already we are bitter

cranberries in each other’s

mouths, biting about photos,

the place of the table, lay

of the bed. The apartment is a City

Hall we cannot fight. So we turn

like lawyers, against each other,

let  the walls stare. There is a mirror

to look into, a nail to hang onto.

Our unopened boxes hide in corners

and closets like beaten children.

And we will take the blood

off the walls and the dust

from the shelves. We have one

year together in a place that

is empty at dusk, and feels like fog

inside and between us

so I cannot see you, and Christ,

tomorrow, we will live here.

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Ryan Van Winkle