Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

When terrorists start a war
through unprovoked attacks
on their neighboring country’s
civilians,
and that neighboring country
first blocks the missiles,
then uses drones to cut down
only the actual person who fired
the last missile, but eventually,
when enough missi...

https://youtu.be/p_7tv9Mx47U

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

It’s been a long hot summer
Our work’s been hard each day
Routine is normal in our home
We have no other way

Our mom keeps busy with her kids
Our family’s rather large
She tirelessly tends to us all
She stays at home, fully, in charge
...

https://youtu.be/oDDFPWmUTHk

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

No raise, no money, no overtime.
This pride ain’t built on a production line.
Your cars, your drinks, your parking fines
keep us down in the welfare line.
We scream, we cry, we love and die.
All for a crumb from the social pie.
But who ...

https://youtu.be/rAtjk7ITOHI

performed by Val Cole

POEM:

the warm, cheap wine
doesn’t taste good but
at least the sea is
mine

I chug what I should have sipped
suppress what I could have done
none of it matters, the money is gone
my father is dead

and the wine is flowing in my blood
just lik...

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

The way I feel
lives in the muscle of your thigh
right before it moves.
Coiled in anxious yes.

Waiting to reach past
Its own name,
to take control and grab you
without hesitation.
Every nerve at attention as hands
clench and tighten around the air.
The quiet game o...

https://youtu.be/ePj2Sa1SfYo

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

Your brain is a sea,
your irises my windows
to watch you drown.

You choke on waves
meant to break on my shore.

You choke on your own hair.

From your skull
tentacles peel,
crawl down your face
like purple ivy
over my windowsill.

You ...

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

They look like an accidental bird,
Wings making grey angles
Their thoughts move in rings around their ears
And scrape against the sharp jaw lines,
Movement horizontally, body stretching across
only to snap back
into embodiedness.
Seeing them, I noticed how
our spine...

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

I have stood in the shadows of giants,
Dwarfed by their statue.
Towering, resolute,
Their energy radiates the jagged shores
Commanding respect.
Demanding awe from the awestruck.
The living faces of ancestors,
Monuments to the dead,
Guardians of the living.
They have...

Performed by Val Cole

Full full poem:

The Art of Pressed Flowers: My Twisted Passion

I pressed the life out of you,
to capture your bloom.
I am sorry I made the decision for you—
I am superficial.
I prefer you stay vibrant, long after your time would have passed.

I wonder if The Fates made ...

Performed by Val Cole

Performed by Val Cole

---
POEM:

Today the world is cold and ethereal
under a white curtain of snow
that seems to laugh
in a gentle, aloof voice,
you don’t know
The mist twirls and slinks
above the water
like a ghost
of the frozen spray

It is a wonder
that anything so warm, so incongruous
as l...

Peformed by Val Cole

POEM:
Gray is my favorite color,
So unbelievably pristine,
So much emotion behind its blank facade,
A limbo between white and black,
Between love and pain,
Between joy and sadness.

Gray is balance.
The color so often seen as plain or boring,
That some people call the color ...

Performed by Val Cole

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

Loving in a Constellation

The realization came at the end of high school,
the time you or I begin to question our beliefs,
or at least start trying.

Her romantic love and energy
could extend to more than one person,
within and past state borders, across time zones...

Performed by Val Cole

https://youtu.be/IOYekvb8zBk

Poetry performed by Val Cole

----
POEM;

Upon ox-eyed daisies, a curse seemed struck
every mid-summer, when I was a child.
One by one, their petals, girls would pluck
‘til no stem held white blossoms in the wild.

Thus-tortured flora, guilty of no crime,
would stoic...

Performed by Val Cole

https://youtu.be/JG8EGDLt2G0

Performed by Val Cole

----
POEM:

You got that midnight skin,
that deep, dark water
that takes the moon to pierce.

I've thread my laugh
on the end of a needle
and stitched it between every breath.

You don't just kiss.
You cut.
Deeply.
That Scorpio tail,
swinging,...

https://youtu.be/OOgwDT0MB-0

Performed by Val Cole

----
POEM:

I love you the way money feels in my hands,
the way it lays there,
the thought of all the things I could do with it.

Also, I love you the way money
leaves my hand
quick, quiet,
then it's gone.

It doesn't pack a bag
it doesn't thi...

https://youtu.be/ODONvrHKgco

Performed by Val Cole

-----
POEM:

We learn love
the way children learn danger
running toward it
full speed,
laughing.

You hid behind your smile,
beneath your skin,
purposely.
Still, I counted
in heartbeats.

One heartbeat,
two.
Danger.
Regret.
Things I never say ...

https://youtu.be/bLIuidQNpUg

POEM:

For Beth on our 25th anniversary

Your fists plunge into a mound of elastic dough
a subtle smear of flour above your eyebrow,
and wisps of dusted hair
the back of your wrists could not wipe away,
pursed lips, flattened palms,
back bent driving your elbows dow...

https://youtu.be/tA420TWmaHU

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

Demoiselle, by James Ross Kelly

In the last part of that time of dusk
when shadows meet the first departure of light.
over three fingers of the river
a Great Blue Heron performed an aerial pirouette.

Down with wisped blue gray feather...

https://youtu.be/HHAP9egsIUU

Performed by Val Cole

----
POEM:

Apologies/what we owe the uni(verse)

Awake, the door elucidates the shape
Of her body, limbs stretched between this privacy
of her mind, which asks What we owe the verse
And If the universe owes us for existence?

Asleep, the blin...