Ryan Black
Winter 2026 | Poetry
from You Were Never Lovelier
Sun today. A different anniversary. My father’s death.
Hard to imagine I’ve lived longer without him
than with him. Who was I then? Same height.
A little thinner. Knee swollen like a grapefruit.
What shook me awake? I go for a walk.
I think of the empty apartment. Her things. My things.
A new house is going up around the corner. The lot’s been vacant
for years. The workers, thank God, are wearing masks.
I think of the teal loveseat and the wing chair.
I think of the standup lamp we bought
for a dollar. The blanket I folded before I left.
Green as the top of a grave.
———
I dreamed her skin was made of diamonds.
Like Emma Frost. Alpha mutant.
Omega-level telepath. We’d spent a year together
reading X-Men comics. The Claremont run.
Then Louise Simonson. Then Whedon and Morrison.
We laughed when Emma Frost subdued
a hateful crowd by inducing in them simultaneous orgasms.
“Bliss buttons,” the speech bubble read.
She activated their bliss buttons.
The videotape running beneath is a tier of panels.
———
X-Men #127 was our favorite. It’s the story
of the mutant Proteus. A shape-shifter of sorts,
he possesses bodies, draining them of life,
then moves on, possessing another.
He can contort the earth, invert gravity, turn speech
to “drops of orange rain.” We read it alongside
the poems of Henri Cole: “Tears represent how much
my mother loves me.” We were living on different coasts then,
she on fellowship, me waiting for the calendar to turn.
I felt unsettled. Foolish. But it’s his mother,
Proteus’ mother, we talked about.
Her implacability. The panel where she means
to kill him. Her right eye pressed to the rifle’s scope.
Her left shut tight as though the shot were done.
———
My father collapsed. I hadn’t thought of it
quite this way before—the pain he must have felt,
how the sky to him suddenly disappeared.
It’s not an easy thing, the heart giving in.
Most of the time, it survives. Although diminished,
it survives. Like a house where nature
has taken residence—the porch caving in,
the windows dark as if after a great fire.
It still resembles itself. The garden overgrown.
And it takes an ordinance to tear it down.
Ryan Black is the author of The Tenant of Fire (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the 2018 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Death of a Nativist, selected by Linda Gregerson for a 2016 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. He has published previously in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York.