Video Readings

The Sea Itself

The ocean was there but I missed it.
The distance to water was the average
of how long it takes to lose hope:

exactly the space held open,
alluring with promise
but really a numbers problem.

Don't tell me time heals everything.
From here the water is a blue carpet to sky,
a paler version of the sea itself,

quiet and still, going on and on.

BCTV, Berks Bards

Berks Story Project

The day ended
in red sky, blue earth

I walked across
a voice that wished

burning the glass
my father drank from

across the blue
a ruby feeling

printed on my brain—
Immunity, I lost you

naming names
as if my parents

did not lie
together and apart

my fire my prism
as if the searing healed

the sound my own
my radiance

began its walk.

BCTV, Berks Bards

Breath grabs me from an airless peace,
my throat a cracked tomb

heaved from a makeshift bed
on the living room rug.

Did I swim the trench zone
only to rise from the dead?

Did some lifeguard drag me back?
Lungs know the hour they awaken.

I'm scrambling on all fours to the sink.
When I return, you’re there.

It’s 3 a.m. You’ve removed the drooping
roses from the coffee table.

I put them in the kitchen, you say,
in case you were asthmatic.

You stand before me, wounded eye
and face from last week’s fall.

I dreamed we had a giant
Christmas card with the whole family in it,
you say. I guess that won't happen this year.

The woman who always said she never dreamed
offers me a glass of water and

remembers nothing in the morning.

Breath gathers firm the old pages
white spines, row of books in a foreign
language you try to love

the questions like locked rooms
windows framed blue
beyond irritable reaching.

A letter is mind but you return
bodily to the scarcity of love
tune to correction in the secret

hollows of fingers and toes
your mouth passing through
the wound, the flower

to the being ground
unharnessed from memory
where we hold each other

not collapsing into the future
but careful as an act of silence
allows itself to be read.