Slated to Learn
Dear territory:
a period takes a final home as a dot;
a school is a stem that flowers, continues to feed the weight of you as a live community;
a read book is a borrowed eye to see a deepening of who we are as bodies apart touching;
a pencil fords uncertainty;
a tongue is a hallway for asking—there is a right way to respond, a nearing of ends spelled
meticulous at a testing;
education is appearance of teachers and taught full of a room;
and this unceasing is a progression of addresses, wires, towns.
Ryan Clark is obsessed with puns and writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press, 2019), and his poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming in Yemasse, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tahoma Literary Review, Flock, Aufgabe, and Posit. He is a winner of the 2018 San Antonio Writers Guild contest, and his work has been nominated for Best of the Net. He currently teaches creative writing at Waldorf University in Iowa.