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Paige Ryan

@paigevryan.bsky.social
869 followers 460 following 199 posts

Poet & hybrid-form enthusiast drawn to soft things with sharp edges: plants with inner lives, bodies that won’t behave, & the absurd comedy of daily life. Best of the Net–nominee. Poems in The Hopper, Tiny Seed Lit., Plants & Poetry, and elsewhere.

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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Why not have a little fun.
paigeryan.substack.com
Cones on the Head
It’s simple, really.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
“as if I’ve ever stood in California and looked toward New York thinking yes, I understand distance now. Place your body at the bottom of a canyon—and you’ll see— at the bottom of a canyon, the scale is such the self…”
open.substack.com
Self, to Scale
on martian crust
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
There’s nothing to do. Only a full commitment to being. [If you’re also in need of this mantra, well, there it is]
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
🚂
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
A record of the thaw.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
I’m not sure when I became the strange woman that walks through the park petting trees but I’m not exactly mad about it. Isn’t it nice? How soft the leaves are as newborns.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Spring seems like a good time to revisit this poem, originally published in a Plants & Poetry House anthology. If you haven’t heard of them and you’re a nature enthusiast, consider this a sign and go check them out!
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
open.substack.com
How to Read a Poem Forensically
On reading without rushing to meaning
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
my sister sent me this snapshot from inside my 8-year-old niece’s brain and I’m like: yes. the poetry gene lives on.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
ever thought about how, like bark, our skin is simply a surface being lived in?
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
Don’t count your chickens.
open.substack.com
Egg Math
on waiting (and so much more)
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
from “be here to love me at the end of the world” by sasha fletcher ☁️☁️
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
I thought I’d have more to say about turning 35, but it seems the words are still marinating. And I’ve learned to let things come at their own time—which somehow always ends up being right. It’s how my poetry manuscript finally arrived: alive with a decade’s worth of words on my 35th birthday.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
The absurdity of working for a mental health org that talks “well-being” while actively eroding it for employees.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
Friendly reminder that it’s a privilege to gain another year, and to invite age to show itself on your body.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
Friendly reminder that it's a privilege to be able to set an intention.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
On giving each other a home.
open.substack.com
The Woman With Thrifted Flamingo Earrings
On giving each other a home.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
Sharing this the day after Christmas feels right. Not a “holiday poem,” but a post-holiday poem—for the quieter hours, the softened nerves, the kind of comfort that’s always there, and the reminder that the giving never stops. It just lowers its voice. (Hope the holidays are treating everyone well!)
open.substack.com
Sky Wrapped in Bow
The physics of comfort (or: more gifts)
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
On days when thinking feels impossible.
open.substack.com
Mouth-Noise
Because this time of year is a lot for our brains.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
If the timing weren’t so uncanny, I’d question why it took me so long to read my favorite poet’s Nobel lecture. “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” — W.S. Permission to not convert everything into certainty. To keep the work alive by staying curious.
nobelprize.org
Nobel Prize in Literature 1996
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1996 was awarded to Wisława Szymborska "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality"
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
First time adding a recording of me reading a poem and it feels like a big deal??? Somehow more vulnerable than the poem itself?? Be kind 🙈😅
paigeryan.substack.com
The Day You Dried Oranges
Because one day will be your last, and you'll be happy.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
This story by @ambersparks.bsky.social is BRILLIANT. Sharp, witty lines that tug hard on a feeling, then abruptly cut it loose before moving on to the next. I’m not even mad about how it plays with my heart, because it’s a thrill—I’m feeling a hundred things at once—and I’m absolutely here for it.
open.substack.com
"Your Life in Parties" by Amber Sparks
"...your retirement party, the one they threw for you at the atrocious Italian restaurant. Surprise!, they all yell, which is so awkward because this isn’t a surprise party...."
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
open.substack.com
Parental Coat
When I think of myself becoming.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
POV: using poetry to trick yourself into feeling something other than what you’re actually feeling 😅
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 23/11/2025
substack.com
Plein Air Poetry (@pleinairpoetry)
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
I love how a why can age—how you can look at it years later and see all it's been through.
substack.com
I Write Because
I write because the world cracks me open
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Would love to connect with others on Substack. Read my latest post here and follow along for more: substack.com/@paigeryan/n...
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
One could argue that the best part about writing is stumbling upon the past selves you’ve forgotten.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
In case the news is a little much, here’s a tender poem to read instead.
open.substack.com
How to Steep a Winter
Leaves of last year’s trees
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
Fall in haiku.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
People need to stop saying “I didn’t eat all day” as if it’s proof of work ethic. It’s not ambition. It’s proof of a system that taught you to confuse self-neglect with dedication. And call it professionalism. (Wild how eating lunch during the workday still feels like a rebellion.)
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
“Never be sad when you can be funny instead—unless you can be funny and sad, which is even better. Slipping on a banana peel? Hilarious. Slipping on a banana peel while already downtrodden? Art.” Finally, a sentiment I can get behind 😅
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 11/10/2025
Death, dressed in its Sunday best. Painted in watercolor. Served almost sweet. Jenny George’s collection stuns in its balance—heavy / light, above / below, grief / grace.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
The curse of being a poet is: every word is guilty until proven innocent 🤔 😅
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
Writing poems is just: uses word I’ve known forever → panics → googles definition.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
Quite possibly my favorite philosophical question to date 😂
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
I picked strawberries last weekend, and halfway through the field—I had a moment. Here’s a poem about remembering what joy tastes like 🍓 “…I eat another, then another, again and again, each more ferociously than the last…”
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
Rebecca Solnits “No Straight Road Takes You There” is currently keeping me sane. Read for good perspective on solidarity, mutual aid, community, and pleasure/leisure’s ability to be a safety net.
Picture of a page in a book that reads: They formed a group they named Common Ground and chose as their slogan "Solidarity not charity," a phrase inspired by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's statement "I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people."Picture of a page in a book that reads: “To put it more directly, what is mutual in mutual aid is not in the goods and services delivered; it's in the underlying belief in the deep connections between those who give and those who receive.
It is a deep belief in and commitment to inseparability: that my well-being is inseparable from yours and that, in caring for yours, I care for myself and, more than that, for the larger whole that is us, because we are in this together. That is, we are not mutual because of the exchange of aid; we aid each other because we are already mutual. The word mutual is often used in this context to mean sym-metrical, as in a symmetrical exchange, a relationship of reciproc-ity, but mutual aid in the sense that ASS and Common Ground practice it isn't exactly this kind of mutual. It is more like the other meaning of the word what we have in common before and beyond exchange: mutual friends, mutual feelings, a mutual fate.”Picture of a page in a book that reads: “This means recognizing the indirect, long-term, and incalculable benefits of actions. One source of my thinking is anthropologist David Graeber's writing on debt, in which he notes that the old idea was that traditional societies bartered, awkwardly, until money smoothed the transactions. He makes the case that, instead, goods and services circulated in complex ways that knit people together as a community; the transactions were never finished in the way that a cash transaction is, and neither were the relationships. Money is, in his telling, specifically a way to terminate a connection, while the other models of circulation strengthened and perpetuated the connections.”Picture of a page in a book that reads: Organizations spring up suddenly—but, to use a fungal met-aphor, just as mushrooms are only the visible, fruiting bodies of the larger fungus that was long there, underground, so emergent disaster mutual aid often arises out of networks that have long ex-isted. In ordinary times, those organizations may exist for other reasons—as church groups or friendship networks; in extraordinary times, it turns out that the pleasure and leisure produced a safety net that can catch us when things fall apart. In those times of crisis, these networks often expand suddenly in ways that matter afterward. Other times, an emergent organization is like spores on the wind that may land in new places, sowing new life.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
I don’t remember where I got this copy of a talk Thich Nhat Hanh did at a correctional institution but it’s full of nice little meditations on poetry and life.
Q: Would you explain something about your poetry?
A: My poetry is something that happens throughout the day. When I water the vegetables or wash dishes, poetry is born in me. When I sit down at the writing table, all I do is deliver the poems. Poetry comes as an inspiration, and is the fruit of my mindful living. After a poem is born, I may realize that it helped me; the poem is like a "bell of mind-fulness."
Sometimes you need to reread a poem you have written because it takes you back to a wonderful experience — it reminds you of the beauty available inside of you and all around you. So a poem is a flower you offer to the world, and at the same time, it is a bell of mindfulness for you to remember the presence of beauty in your daily life.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
You know a poetry book is good when…
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 23/02/2025
Retreating back to nature where the chaos of the world can’t get me. Send me poems that ground—either ones you’ve read or written. #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #naturewriting
A poem that reads:

TO BE HEARD, ONE NEEDN'T MAKE A SOUND
I am myself tree-like,
the who of me
a fist of wood and xylem.
Did you know?
If a girl falls in a forest and no one's around to hear it, her fingers pierce the soiled ground and keep growing.
Years later, she's a woman
[buried alive in dirt]
and her favorite thing
is to watch from her branches,
the way the rain bleeds yellow with meadow pollen.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
The novel “Playground” is my first exposure to Richard Powers and I must say, the out-of-the-blue burst of magical realism on page 173 is such a flex. #booksky
Photo of a portion of a book that reads: “The girl was haunted and withdrawn. Dora wanted only to be read stories. By four, she started to invent them. Suppose the moon went down into a mouse hole to have a look around. Suppose Gramma's false teeth fell into the telephone and came out the other end and bit your earlobe.” From “Playground” by Richard Powers.
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Reposted by Paige Ryan
Dan Schkade @danschkade.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
WRITING TIP: if you get stuck, try making the font really really big. This will remind you of being a baby, when you only knew twelve words and didn't know about death
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
Also I can’t stop referring to my baked goods as babies because my biological clock is like WHAT ELSE COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE DOING. #writingcommunity #poetrycommunity #breadmaking #queerwriter #queerpoet
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
Spent the day watching my sour baby grow up instead of whatever garbage is popping up in the news. 10/10 recommend if you want to maintain your sanity.
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
Modern day self-care 101 🍯 🥲 #writingcommunity #writinglife #poetrycommunity #queerartist #queerpoet #queerwriter
A poem that reads:

“THE AFTERMATH OF SCROLLING THE NEW YORK TIMES IN JANUARY (2025)

I overdid it on the honey again this morning—
first in tea, then on yogurt, 
followed by a long drawn out drizzle 
across the counter, 
my dogs heads, 
my head, 
a little in each shoe before leaving—
and whatever was left of the bear,
I took in my tote to go. 

My body, responding to a need for sweetness. 

My mind, letting it.”
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
Working for a company that directly conflicts with your values is a special kind of fun. Someone send me a poem beautiful enough to drown out my disappointment in humanity. (I promise I’m not usually this dramatic, it’s just been a day) #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity
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Paige Ryan @paigevryan.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
You wouldn’t be a creative in the modern world if you didn’t have 12 million project ideas a day that you sadly had to lay to rest for the grind 🥲 🪦💔 #writingcommunity #poetrycommunity #lifewriting #naturewriting
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