Michael O'Ryan, a white man with short dark hair, smiles at the camera, his hands inside the pockets of his pea coat. O'Ryan is standing in an alley between two rows of brick buildings. — Michael O’Ryan

Assistant Editor Andy Sia: Michael O’Ryan’s cinematographic poem is imbued with a sibyllic mood. Surfaces cloud over—plexiglass covered in frost—obscuring that which is underneath. At other times, the surface yields, though uneasily: a window’s mirrored image and, akin to a piece played on the piano, “rendition” of another. “Aspen,” then, seems like an attempt at clarity, an attempt to arrive at an understanding of the relationship between two lives, even as the voice is inundated with the inevitability of “[d]ark amber,” of time, of memory.

Listen to O’Ryan read the poem:

Aspen

We exited the historic downtown cinema
discussing the debut feature from a Macedonian director.
You called the narration a betrayal of discovery,
described the photography as handsome. What purpose
did it serve, my endless wish for reassurance?
Aspens flared, frost mosaicked plexiglass,
there was something chastening about that sudden need for gloves.

In the evening: black rice, a piano turning cold to the touch,
and I saw not you in the reflection of the balcony window
but the glass’s rendition of you at the instrument.
Unclothed, what remained were four necklaces,
two lives that would soon river apart. Dark amber
shone from the lone lamp overnight,
tinting even what curved away from it.

Michael O’Ryan’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Greensboro Review, Ninth Letter, Third Coast, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he won a Hopwood Award and received a Zell Fellowship.