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Ryan Van Winkle

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Ryan Van Winkle is a poet, live artist, podcaster and critic living in Edinburgh. He was listed as part of Canongate's 'Future Forty' in 2013. His first collection, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here (Salt, 2010) won the Crashaw Prize. He is also the host and co-producer of the arts podcast The Multi-Coloured Culture Laser and the poetry podcast for the Scottish Poetry Library. Find his website at www.ryanvanwinkle.com.

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Under Hotel Sheets

And the mother with scarlet baby biting
and the trucker with the bullet whore, crying

though he'd like to do more. And the newlyweds
too poor to go too far – but still he brings crimson

and the nurse escapes, blots her mascara
on paper sheets which dry an ink spill,

and the farmer sweats the night
and goes back to grass the next day,

and the male too scared to shit,
waits for the balloons to break.

And only yesterday I was told
of my grandmother below hospice sheets, 


and there's angel dust in skeletal lamp light,
brown, moth-size burns left on the shade.

And someone looked out this window,
and someone spilled wine for the floor

and you have to tell yourself without fear
where this goes, and what we leave,

what remains whenever
we are a little bit gone. And how many

others have had this bed and done
what I've done – come in a hand

beneath whispering sheets,
wiped their ghosts on white before sleep?


‘Our Door, After a Turbulence’ from Tomorrow, We Will Live Here © Ryan Van Winkle. Reprinted by kind permission of the author and Salt Publishing, 2010. 

Ryan Van Winkle talks to the Scottish Poetry Library podcast about his first collection, Tomorrow We Will Live Here.
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