PEACE UNTO STRANGERS – Ryan Raymond Buell

April 16, 2026

Tide of Crowns

A sacred monster embalmed in CNN light.
Held sacred for its hideousness. A dream
offers hard reprieve: out held hands, palms
broken in a floral lantern. The antiquated
future of a billion people descending the
mountainside of dust. Enshrined stain of
semen sprinkled in emerald trinkets in the
sodden field. The Road to Damascus is
closed, take the detour.

 
Peace Unto Strangers

A man who was smaller than his shadow
cradles a music box on his lap. He winds the
handle.

The giantess at the espresso machine, a
hummingbird perched on her cheekbone,
honors the mountains by spilling a cup of
blood in the river.

A child with a cake box balanced on her
head stands on tiptoe at the edge of the
dock. She tips forward, and the cake box
falls and balances on the crest of a wave.

 
Statues in Procession

The new bone-tree bleeds gemstones
into the garden trough. Unopened wisdom
boxes on the cold ground at midnight’s
wrist as the women remainder a path
to the sonorous stones—a basin of worn
enamel, filled to the brim, cleanses a herd
of motherless calves murmuring prayers to the
moon to foster them. Their deep-voiced call
girdled and suspended across smoke. A lost
coin warms to the touch as the dry grass
whispers: mourning morning mourning
morning.

 
Sound Texture Magnified

An apple seed squeaks an empty
chair, wooden joists engraved with
out thinking, designs similar to wind
and snow the texture of callused
halves—nowhere is there an aphid
chewing the wooden leaf. Old lady
leavened and named the same
number of amber blossoms
on the hearth-skin, dug enamored
from red brick and oven’s warm
breath the window grilles and door
to the room in the apple core.

 
World Leaders

Hands jostling limply
erratic at their sides.

Foreheads hangdog
in crease of jawbone.

Fabric of white dirt
brush linoleum grass.

Televised content
remains of leaves.

An unbroken pixel
in the foreground.

 
No One

Engraved planes of the no one’s face
turns the moon forward. The no one
is imperfect. A tulip sprig in toothsome
hand-wrung glories is not difficult
in awareness of its deft flicker;
embodied bystanders ignore the dint
of the no one’s earth—his efforts
clean enough to be preserved
in tree sap, or glove. Eyes turned
aside the no one keeps to no one’s
self: plastic lidded ideals, a cured
penchant for forgetting, and annotated
facial impressions of a woman
of facile shade embarked upon
by depth of colors no one knew.