The Sound of Your Voice

Hey there, and thank you for doing this for me. I for a long time have known that my poems lie there, inert things, until a reader comes along and breathes life into them.

So I am interested in hearing some of that breath. I want, with your permission, to publish the sound files of your reading alongside the text. 

To do this FIRST, choose which of these three poems you want to record (you can record as many as you want if you wish).

SECOND read it aloud to yourself a few times and when you are ready, record yourself reading it (I'd recommend the voice memo app on iOS) and email it to me at ryan@5thingsilearnedtoday.com.

For clarity sake let me suggest a pattern for the recording:

"Hi my name is __________. I am reading from ________( location).

Then simply read the title and the poem. PLEASE don't worry about trying to read it the way I would read it. It is YOUR poem now.

Thank you for being you.

We Burn

There are bowls on our
windowsills. Bowls of clear
broth, never boiled or broken—
insoluble domes of oil, a whole
carcass in the pot, slices of
unpeeled ginger, a lemon maybe—

some moments we want to
unzip our hot stomachs onto the
subway floor, or tumble.
hands outstretched, for the third
rail which will allow us to regain
light speed—

steam lifts off the surface of
the broth. Deep in the bowl,
the heat is churning the liquid
invisibly, fields of oil coil and
separate. The spoon is coated
with it, lively and bright
going in, coated like plasma
coming out.

The Salience of Sunset

Elsewhere, the man might have felt the sun track warm radiance
across his face, with the divine eye’s approving judgement
reckoning up his material worth alongside the force of his will.
Elsewhere, the girl just beginning her loud adjustment, the coyote
having learnt the arroyos with the sweetest airs, the jogger in his
tunnels of thought passes without notice, and questions
of beauty stain the sky. Elsewhere no one watches. Here,
he bends to the bending light, she waits on a voice, the coyote
licks his salty wrist and the jogger is doused with noise.

Brothers at Lakeside

And after pulling through the dark green trough
of the mountain road, a dim carpark behind
a bar.  The lake below.  The blackened face
is smooth enough for us to see the stars.
But one of us prefers the girls who lift
heavy glasses of beer again, again
to touch their mouths with a galaxy of foam,
and the other one prefers the girls themselves.
If movement were a form of grace, the lake
a kind of pillow, not to find tonight
a darker bar, a further station, would
the moon that is and is not the sun still rise
above the hills directly across the lake
from us?  Its watery twin so much requires
our diving in.  A bat twivers from tree
to tree and says Go in, below is where
the action is. The moon that is and is not.