Two Poems
Ryan Clark
History About Cave Creek
for Cave Creek, Oklahoma, no longer a town
The washed
away things
we are way back
and early,
dust hung red
as embers
wearing out—
we tend to leave
in a form of flight
that finds us
losing where
we started.
Cave Creek
is a school—
we all walked
to school.
The Wichita
When the span of language
read the region into Wichita,
each sound tread native,
lived in cones, all grass
houses a shared vowel
to describe home.
The people’s eyes raccooned,
fitted around the face proud-
dotted with dark spots
tossed off from absence
shaking the semi-permanent
villages of the Wichita.
We are ideal trading posts,
with peace taken to others
periodically. A visit to the Wichita
is mapped, and their vicinity
is Texas, or, in good time
the United States of America.
Is the surface of the prairie
as broken as the Wichita
sounds for prairie, as broken
as the need for language.
Is the photograph of a word
all we retrace in this.
Ryan Clark is obsessed with puns and writes much of his work through 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 recently appeared in Yemasse, The Shore, riverSedge, Flock and Homonym. 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.
