Why I Left the Poetry Reading?

by S Stephanie

Something about the clouds in the windows
was upsetting, they were traveling
on before I could grasp them
and the poets were reading faster
love, dogs, and deer leaping away
so quickly their legs were left behind.
I kept hearing the bodies
of sunken ships, their half buried bells
muffled, going through the motions
of clanging. They had tried to surface
they really had. The smooth
skin of dolphins, the rough barnacled
breaching whales, the surfers
and the sharks that went after them even
all beckoned. Yet, there was something
about those clouds, their insistence
on dispersal perhaps
that ships and I could not rise to.