STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
RYLER DUSTIN
My father gives advice in my garden:
prune the apples every spring.
The tomatoes need more manure.
This dirt is drier than death.
All his life, he has been trying to learn
the slow, awkward language of care.
His father’s love was a dialect of fists
passed down from the mining camp
where he was born. Now my father
paces our perimeter, frowns
and installs a length of barbed wire
to guard against deer. He kneels
and whispers to the melons,
something tender no one can hear.
After we make love in our new apartment,
I think of my boyhood bus stop,
a burned-out minimart across the county road—
how, before the sun rose, we’d line up
by the bulbless lamps, gas pumps
with their tubes torn out,
the storefront’s smoky windows
lit with flames of pink graffiti.
Once, the seventh grader Ann
left her place in line and led me
into the brush behind the store.
She leaned by a broken window,
pulled me close, and kissed me
in the scent of rot and firs.
Past her shoulder, I could see
into an older, burned up world—
a wreck of blackened beams,
soft drink ads in swirling ash,
the glint of shattered glass
where two lean cedars shivered
above the cracked linoleum—
formless, flashing silver
in a shaft of early sun
they both leaned into.
Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Ryler Dustin has represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam and performed spoken word across the U.S. He’s the author of Heavy Lead Birdsong from Write Bloody Publishing, and his poems appear in places like American Life in Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, and The Best of Iron Horse. He lives and teaches in mid-Michigan.
