William Ryan Hilary has had poems published in Junk, 40oz Bachelors, The Wilderness Review, and Aquirelle’s print anthology, Poets Amongst Us III. His prose has been published in The Midway Review. Bless them all for having him. Ryan studied English at Vassar, where he was accepted into the competitive Senior Composition program. In other words, he was allowed to submit creative writing instead of a real thesis. Somehow this Ryan chap also earned an MA from Union Theological Seminary in philosophy and theology. Ryan will always feel uncomfortable writing about himself in the third person … Mr. Torrance. He will use humor to distract from his madness.

Invocation
By William Ryan Hilary

Amuse me!

Nothing is as nothing was
Now emptiness is and blindness
And all the spaces
And all those “things” forgotten
Or unheard are
Suddenly important.

This will be the hour of something.
The clamorous grief of a dead slave’s voice
Rising to an orchestral, bitter peak.

I was their familiar stranger
Sailing the poet’s night tyreme
Drifting the surface of the salty universe
While waiting for the Son to come up.

As the ancients invoked their gods
I invoked the abandoned dead
Indians, slaves, martyred women.

In the distant clamor
I sang
Through an unanticipated storm.