Ryan Teitman

Ryan Teitman Poems

Ryan Teitman Biography

Ryan Teitman was born in Philadelphia and is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He received his BA from Penn State University and worked as a newspaper reporter in and around Philadelphia before receiving an MFA and MA from Indiana University. His poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, and Washington Square, among other publications.)

The Best Poem Of Ryan Teitman

Another Country

The days unfold
like maps. Fresh dirt
in the garden, black
as cake, grows warm.

The roses perform
a silent recital,
each playing its part
from memory. I wait

for my father the way
men wait for a train.
I wait for my father
the way a dancer

waits for music.
My mother is a curtain
in the window.
She calls me in

to fit my shadow
for a suit. I keep still
as she pinches the tape
around its wrist.

Around her neck
my mother's pearls
clink like teeth.
Your shadow grows

faster than you do,
she says. She says
that waiting is
a kind of dancing.

At night I dance
with the stillness.
My blood waits
behind my chest

like a man behind
a locked door.
My father waits
in another country.

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