Kylan Rice

There are Stairs Descending the Door Knob is Broken

Someone being winched up by a chain. A twist of blue flowers near a white plate. Some sign language in a white hallway. The sun as though we might never need to wake up again. My mother tells me she loves me. She obeys me which causes me to weep in the corner. Bathrooms, knives, rooms. My first kiss in a frozen car. In the middle of a snow-covered lake, no one can move. There’s a phone call but it turns out it is just some snow muffling pain. All her life my mother desired a balcony to walk out onto. Now she walks toward me, her oldest son, as though hiding a huge gift behind her back. There are a few things I am still afraid of... Hotels. Bottom teeth. The sun in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The World is Not Enough

My tastes are changing, this is a love note. Pleasure, hardwood floors. My vas deferens is stranger and stranger to me. I find myself in a bathtub covered in all of your black hair: a depressing mystery. There is the feeling that even if it wasn’t snowing. I fawn around then towel off. I make a kissing sound but it is inside of a log cabin where no one appreciates it. My parents just wore gold wedding bands all of their life. The diamonds were in other places. They put their diamonds inside my heart. It was like living through multiple lonely winters. Now when I walk across a marble floor I am the gold flecks. I am the champagne and the eaten raspberries found in the stomach. And when I run from the room you tilt your glass in the light. The memory of being a small but nevertheless black earring in my mother’s heart.

Kylan Rice has poetry published or forthcoming from Similar:Peaks::, BROWN GOD, death hums, Birdfeast, Gigantic Sequins, and elsewhere. He is editor for likewise folio and Inscape: A Journal of Literature and Art. He lives in Utah.