All in by Zoë Ryder White
by Zoë Ryder White
From inside the murmuration, I texted Jo. I am inside these birds, I wrote. I sent a seven-second video. OH!! Jo wrote back. The birds lifted in sequence from their several trees, lit again on several others a little farther down the hill. I felt the air they beat on my face and hands. I felt my heart’s indecorous thud. How many landing blackbirds, and no one missed their branch! Then they were gone. Since they were gone, I started running. I thought to text Jo later: is there a finite number that represents how many times a person might stand inside a flock? What if this is my fourth-to-last time??? But maybe the issue is less a scarcity of murmurations than a scarcity of imagination, of action plans. Running down the ridge, I thought, I need not passively accept my own projected lack of blackbird. I could just go to where the birds are and be still. But where had they gone? At bedtime tonight, my son said, a number is a number is a number and it goes on forever. Ever is a number, he said, and every number also has its word. He asked, what is the difference between the number alone and the word we say for it? It irks, that distance. The birds are darts, are darning needles, are gasps of sorrow, are bickering in the bare trees, are gripping bark, are gorging on seeds, are sparks on the wire, are gone again, lifting as you stumble through their cloud.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Zoë Ryder White’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. Her most recent chapbook, Via Post, won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. Her chapbook, HYPERSPACE, is available from Factory Hollow. She co-authored, with Nicole Callihan, A Study in Spring. Elsewhere, their most recent collaboration, won the Sixth Finch chapbook competition in 2019. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.
by Zoë Ryder White
There is a fractaled edge of land,
inlaid and resonant, just beneath the one
the plane flew over, getting here.
Just so: the size and shape
of solitude is the size and shape exact
as the real chair encased
in the seen chair, the real hand inside
the hand held, the real lake sunk
into the lake we strip to wade.
So it is. So it is,
isn’t it?
Bone at the bone?
Cell’s cell, atom at
the atom’s dark core?
All this time spent trying
to pull sidewalk off sidewalk,
peel porch from porch.
Bite towards each nut’s nut.
Sometimes, we collide,
and then half a hitch later
the ones within each one
collide, too. That’s how
love is. Neither word
nor word inside
can get it right.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Zoë Ryder White’s poems have appeared in Thrush, Hobart, Sixth Finch, Threepenny Review, Crab Creek Review, and Subtropics, among others. She co-authored a chapbook, A Study in Spring, with Nicole Callihan. Their second chapbook collaboration, Elsewhere, is forthcoming from Sixth Finch in March 2020. A former public elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching.
by Zoë Ryder White
My neighbor, in her green gloves and plastic bunny mask, is training her pear tree—a child, really—to stand straight, arms outstretched. The tree goes two-dimensional with this effort. It’s a training meant to bring beauty; symmetry. Every year as the branches grow, there is more length to tie down. To plant a no-shitting-dogs icon in the square of dirt around what you’d call the tree’s trunk, my neighbor trades the bunny mask for raccoon. The tree is drawn and quartered, though my neighbor is kind; encouraging. Things grow well around her. She binds the tree’s branches to the frame with twisties. She pushes the raccoon mask onto the top of her head so she can see what she’s doing. When the tree is old enough to bear fruit, pears will hang from the frame like a row of pears at the market. When the other neighbor walks by, the one who calls me fucking white whore, will she admire the honey blush around the pears’ dangling bottoms? And will I? My neighbor puts a new mask on. What a collection! This one is the tusked wild boar. Dangerous, delicious. G. says we’re each a little queer in our queer little way. Kurt C. said something similar in the nineties but I’m not sure he meant what she means. If I sit still, I feel what moves through my carotid. A pot of bones boils in the kitchen. I render the spring fat. I lay my hands on me.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Zoë Ryder White lives in Brooklyn with her family, writing poems and editing books for educators about the craft of teaching. Her poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, Threepenny Review, Crab Creek Review, and Subtropics, among others.
