Portside

The Wire Said

By Jed Myers

                        “…we have been most ourselves, when we have opened our doors…”
                                   —Amy Davidson, in The New Yorker 
                                                     

Held up behind a red in evening rain,
my FM station on, I heard a man
who’d left his house in rubble, crossed a plain
and then a sea, gone north without a plan,
now faced a razor wire fence—it met
horizon at both ends. The wire said
a vast estate of folk more fortunate
had spread this far, and that its forbears bled
a sea to claim it. Then a rush of surf
it seemed poured through the radio—a gust
blown here, I thought, across the bordered turf,
from where the nomad shifted in the dust.
His ragged English rode like froth on flood.
It floated through the wire, blood to blood.

Jed Myers lives in Seattle where he’s a psychiatrist with a therapy practice. His collections include Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award) and the chapbook The Nameless (Finishing Line Press). His work has received Southern Indiana Review’s Editors’ Award, the Literal Latte Poetry Award, Blue Lyra Review’s Longish Poem Award, and, in the UK, the McLellan Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Cultural Weekly, Crab Orchard Review, Cider Press Review, Citron Review, and elsewhere.