Ryan Stephen Thornton

34 | queer poet | performance maker | historian | chaotic bisexual | 🏳️‍🌈 he/him

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

My poetry collection Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel is out now.
It’s messy, maximalist, queer, and sweating through its best shirt.
Poems about desire, shame, grief, arses, ghosts, & the sacred act of wanting too much.

Buy it. Read it. Survive it.

Link in bio.

[🍂 @Lovandfear]

when kafka said ‘you wouldn’t believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it’ and when brontë said ‘if you ever looked at me with what I know is in you, I would be your slave’ and when Sartre said ‘if I’ve got to suffer it may as well be at your hands’

[✨ Jaia Hamid Bashir ✨ @jaiaarana]

The great lie of the last decade: art is a way to metabolize trauma. As if pain were raw material and the poem a refinery. That flattens art and systemic injustice. I’ve published the poems. I still have all my grief. I watch the world burn.

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

@jaiofearth Ooh very intriguing… ☺️

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

@theirnameisali Does that make you like a reverse Frank O’Hara? 😂

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

a poem about soft disasters, sticky kitchens, sandwich metaphysics, and the terrible tension of not quite touching.

because love happens in kitchens, with Billie on the radio, not just under moonlight with classical music and metaphors about swans. 🥵🥪💌

[Stone Circle Review @stonecirclerev]

“The words secret and sacred are siblings.”

-- Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

@SealeyChallenge So many to choose from! Here’s a few on my TBR list right now.

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

🌈 DAY 30 — WILD CARD — THE FINAL PRIDE POEM! 🌈

today, there is no prompt. today is the wild card, the chaos slot, the glitterbomb finale, the "whatever you want" of prompts. I want your weirdest. your sexiest. your funniest. your proudest. the poem that feels the most you.

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

🩰VERSE TRAP #29🩰

Inspired by those defiant decades where queerness became survival strategy, political act, and disco-lit elegy—this is for the ones who knew that mourning and movement are not opposites. That joy is a form of resistance.
#VerseTraps2025

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

🟣🕺💚
VERSE TRAP #28: THE POETRY OF POP!
💚🕺🟣
📼 tonight’s forecast: full technicolour whiplash
🎺 cue cymbal crash / cue thigh-high chub-rub skirt spin at 40rpm
💥 cue accordion chest / cue chandelier-high grinning / cue desire lit in flashing bulbs—TEN FEET HIGH!

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

🛼✨VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY 27✨🛼

Make it read like a dare. Like a memory you haven't had yet. Let it flirt, bite, heal, hex, and roller skate.
Deadline: June 30
Let’s confuse the algorithms. Let’s write like it’s foreplay.
Let’s trap the verse and make it beg.
#VerseTraps2025

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

🌈✨VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY 26✨🌈

Today’s prompt is a love letter to a broken hyperlink in your brain.
A soft static where something used to be.
You remember them—sort of. Or maybe they were you.

Let’s glitch—and forget why we walked into the room.
#VerseTraps2025

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

🃏✨ VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY 25 ✨🃏
(This is the one I’ve been waiting for!!)
This is chaos in a beer garden.
Let this be your permission slip to get absolutely feral with it.

Write the poem that only these 3 things could make happen. Let’s go full goblin mode.
#VerseTraps2025

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

🌈✨ VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY 24 ✨🌈
The theatre of the heart is velvet-lined, overacted, and playing to a half-empty room. Today’s prompt is built on the bones of a showtune—and this time, the spotlight hurts.

📅 Deadline for all submissions: June 30

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

🌞✨DAY 23✨🌞

Today’s prompt is for the kids we used to be.
The feral ones. The barefoot ones.
The ones who scraped their knees on curbs
and thought summer might never end.
Let’s trap time. Let’s run until the sky forgets our names.
Let’s verse trap.

#VerseTraps2025

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

✨ VERSE TRAP 2025 — DAY 22 ✨

🧷Write a poem that spills everything you really meant.
Not the words you said—
but what was stitched between them.
Let the subtext be the main text.
Let the phone ring.
Let her pick up—
or not.

✨ #VerseTrap2025

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

🌈🔥 VERSE TRAPS 2025: DAY 21 🔥🌈

Today's prompt is for the ones who talk too much because they’re scared to say the one thing that matters.
For the overthinkers, the flirters, the ones who turn small talk into survival tactics.

#VerseTraps2025

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

DAY 20:
Write a poem made entirely of confessions. Bonus points for the absurd and the tender.

Tell us what you stole. Who you watched. What you never said. Who you still want to text. What your mum doesn’t know. What makes you feel safe. What made you cry in public.

[Ryan Stephen Thornton @RyanSThornton]

🕺 Day 19

I want hips. I want limbs. I want the kind of dancing that leaves fingerprints. This one’s about what lives just beneath your skin and what gets released when it starts to move.

So… what does your body say when the lights go down?