I first got acquainted with Ryan through his submission to our print issue, Vol. 6, where he sent two poems called “sometimes the word for tender isn’t tender.” Fortunately I’ll always have these poems to connect me back to that person and, now, his chapbook, Letters from a Strange Land, which he recently published with Carrion Bloom Books. Heartbroken as we were to learn of the passing of our cherished HFR colleague, who graced our pages as a contributor and editor, we asked Jace & Rachel at the press if we could run an excerpt of the chapbook as a sort of memorial in letters to our great friend.
In his time with HFR, Ryan thoughtfully carved out opportunities for others by reading poetry submissions, soliciting work for the Zachary Doss Friends in Letters Memorial Fellowship, writing various Saturday morning chapbook reviews, and recording a video conversation with musician and poet Steve Von Till. He stayed friends with all of us as he moved on to other ventures, such as editing Gulf Coast and earning his PhD with University of Houston, and it was awesome to see him grow and share his writing with the wider world.
I was able to virtually attend Ryan’s memorial at University of Houston and loved hearing stories about him from the lives in which he made a daily difference, and fiercely miss the guy. Read his HFR contributions here and please seek out more of his work. Rest in peace, buddy.
The following excerpt comes from the chapbook, Letters from a Strange Land, which Carrion Bloom has released as a second edition in paperback (and you can read the entire digital version of the book on their website for free).
—Jason Teal
from Letters from a Strange Land
when i said i loved …
i tried to grab the sound
from the room
and swallow,
and i worked
its absolute saw
on the mesh netting
around us: the arms and the wood,
thighs, and aluminum
harvested from the earth’s core
where hydrogen and magnesium
enjoyed together.
the arm is an instrument.
the mouth: a hole to pour milk into the body.
milk is nothing
but what remains around it.
a stone inside
a glacier.
this is a projection.
humans are
thirty-five percent daffodil,
so when a human fills with milk
two holes leave a flower.
each gerbera daisy
contains a meshwork of hundreds of smaller holes.
there is no flower
that provides more chances.
i walked by the refrigerator
into the hole where
i left love
floating and tumbled
onto the pistil. know this,
i tried to become it
the bright milk the bee stuck into me.
dear yellow hammer, i heard ribs are the bone structure you love most. i heard your teeth are for finding the use of limbs. in my palm. pressed to revoke the difference between used and user, a kiss and the oppression of holding. intimate and blistered. i heard when you tap your head above and to the left of the knee the shock warms the thigh like heat in the coming together of magnets. the dissolving of water. i heard it is impossible to take the head of a hammer in the mouth without touching tongue to face. to be compelled. to rip nails from a wall as if you leave no scar rending tooth from gum.
on your behalf, rusted leg braces, skin met the biting corners of rock, and on your behalf splits of meaty pink lips. the bones needed mending, dependent on that which was owned; i revoked you, in dust to roaches. you were fire-born and cooling. i was a translucent bladder of lemonade filled with eyes sitting on a sun beaten boulder. those passing stopped at my stinging. in youth, a singed time of fraternity and the coming debt, the dreamed head of a riding pony severed. then tire smell and table scraps, bonds that kept us dependent and breaking on the horse track. years between movement of legs, singing years of steel and sun. now, you are closet-shut and dusty. you leg memory and the musculature of memory’s growth. quietly, you lip a prayer, polish be forgotten.
dear white rope, i admire the way you compartmentalize the body. i admire your fluid control of spirals, your red impressions left on flesh and the blood-trail’s flee. your own sick-sweet control of gravity. to swallow and concede to the curving intestines, i beseech you. i admire your will to always go tighter from neck to toe. i dub you rope of freedom in the dream where you squeeze until my limbs blue. without them i am neither service nor supplicant. i am a supple stone washed smooth over years on an island shore, a single glimmer in the horizon of the ocean, green light winking from the spine-still kelp.
a beautiful photograph takes its deceptive rest.
its actants crack into air from its nest.
a black and white light graces his jaw.
beautyinert on a table. beautyassault on a history. beautybattery on a memory.
a kendo stick taut against his adam’s apple. a superhero tattooed on his bicep.
behind his naked, tied-up shoulders, his blonde cousin grits her teeth.
his skin an organ desiccated, whole. a quixotic currency in the dream of a pure life.
one.
one whole zero.
overtaking the background foreground midground.
you, used to bind, stone to feet in water.
stone to zero.
forever in a picture.
zero to feet to stone.
pink gum wrapper, what changes? in sixty-three years, i am still sitting on the red corners of the red benches of the high school. still, the smell of cigarettes. still, counting flesh particles in the pores of the asphalt. the restroom leaks a red smell. you are not the correlative i imagined for myself. you are not the red tip of my cigarette ash turning into blood. in sixty-three years, i smash you in the inch-thick heel of my new black boot. i chew the inside of my cheek until i smell metal. i wear you like a boutonniere with a boot mark. i want to be that tiny treatise fading to pink. we could write a book on transcendence. from red to grain. from cellophane to paper. from finger to fist.
then what do i do when my front door creaks open into evening?
dear red apple, i bit you and you stained my teeth in letters that spell forever, bedroom, sacrifice, and heat. this is a riddle and the answer is liminality. i protect you like a system of organs. a regular body must be fixed in tons and earth and pressure. i have dissected you like a pair of lungs and your bubbling flesh marks my hand in letters that spell conjugal, nail, spark, and orgone. this is a riddle and the answer is spectacle. the answer is mask transitioning to face and stubble. to peel as feathers in the hands of augurs, the answer is an arrangement of strips. the answer is the hot diamond bottom of the bowl you sit in. you are the heat bitten. you are the heart beating in the blue-streaked light of the dance club.
Ryan Bollenbach is the author of Letters from a Strange Land (Carrion Bloom Books, 2026). He formerly served as the managing editor of Gulf Coast and the poetry editor of Black Warrior Review. His writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, Bennington Review, Quarterly West, Snail Trail Press, and elsewhere.
Reprinted with permission of Carrion Bloom Books
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