NEW POETRY BY RYAN VANCE AND ROSS WILSON
RYAN VANCE was born in Northern Ireland and is now living in Glasgow. He is editor of weird lit zine The Queen’s Head (www.thequeenshead.wtf) and edits fiction for The Island Review (www.theislandreview.com) while working in the print industry and as a freelance designer. His own work has appeared in Out There: A Scottish Anthology of LGBT Writing, Until Only The Mountain Remains, Homespun Threads and Crispin Best’s For Every Year. (www.ryanvance.co.uk)
ROSS WILSON has previously appeared in Edinburgh Review, Horizon Review, Anon, Gutter, Agenda Broadsheet, Northwords Now and many other magazines, with poems forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review this autumn. A poem, Anithir Season, has recently been adapted into a filmpoem by artist Alastair Cook.
From a Problem with the Thickness of the Grease Inside the Body
Spectres shortcutting through the park at night.
Movements obscure and smoothly unpredictable,
they turn towards you:
a sweep of torchlight, a fright
of bell and chain.
Darker spirits, daredevils,
whisper up behind you razor thin –
take a piece of you onward
into the dark.
Some Dancers Inherit a Deficit
(To Ian Hamilton Finlay)
reserved by the speakers a space
for those who choose to dance alone
lights-up loneliness rightly deserved
lousy talkers splash words on the floor
all the better to slide up to strangers
who may take them home not us
spaced out by the speakers reserved
Ryan Vance
Routes
I remember ticking no religion
in my first job application form.
‘Yir a Protestant,’ he told me.
‘No, Ah’m no,’ I told him.
At his funeral a Catholic neighbour
said, year after year,
he signed Christmas cards comrade.
Things aren’t always as they appear.
Escape routes connected the pits
in case of disaster.
That’s another thing he told me.
Years later I see disused routes
under the fields and streets
between men, and imagine
lifelines buried in fists
blooming into palms.
Ross Wilson
If you wish to read the poems in page view, the following link will take you to a PDF – Ryan Vance and Ross Wilson Poems
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