When Our Reach Exceeds Our Grasp
Time Is Water Too Deep to Freeze
An Exile, a Firefighter, and a Manager Walk into a Therapy Session
I Tell My Brain No One Is Dying
EMDR
Slayer Calls
In the Shells, an Echo
The Florida International University Pedestrian Bridge Collapse
Former Miss Teen Tampa Polishes Her Crown at 92
Filling Out Paperwork
When Our Reach Exceeds Our Grasp
I sit at these keys desperate
to say something beautiful
something meaningful something
with honest words
you will hear with ears desperate
for truth, something beautiful
that melts away the pain something
you’ve never heard
let it be more than desperate
thoughts, or empty beautiful
prayers that don’t fix something
this deep, this torn
this close to dead desperate
to be healed and whole beautiful
to feel, to feel, to feel something
renewed, reborn
Time Is Water Too Deep to Freeze
And that’s a good thing.
We need four liters a day to live.
It’s two-thirds of the human body.
Seventy percent of the planet
is covered by water. Frost tells us
how destructive ice can be.
Time is not our enemy. It’s a mercy
that moves us from one place
to the next. Don’t fear losing youth’s
vigor or visage, or childhood’s
dreamy-eyed innocence.
There’s nothing to be afraid
of, even when the night changes.
Because the water carries us from pain
to pleasure, we will never get stuck
in this day forever.
And that’s a good thing.
Letting go means packing light.
Waking up is another try.
Remember how the sun warms
our pale skin, how we won’t always
be lost in the dark.
A brain is funny thing.
It will swear we’ve always
felt this way, or never will again;
it will promise nothing better
in the distance, that the road dead ends—
that we’d be better off
dead, ending it all with a jump
off a balcony or a fall from a bridge.
Time is water deep enough to drown
the lies swimming in our head.
An Exile, a Firefighter, and a Manager Walk into a Therapy Session
The doctor asks me to close my eyes and imagine myself as a child
a girl young enough that her disposition was not yet wired, brain not formed
a girl old enough to hear my words, old enough to understand
a girl with bright blue eyes, mind teeming with curiosity, heart not yet broken
a girl young enough to trust me, young enough to believe me
a girl old enough to sit with me on a bench in a peaceful park, birds singing
There’s no one around to witness this conversation through time. Imagine her. You.
Now tell her the one thing she needs most to hear. One sentence. That’s all.
It’s not your fault.
I Tell My Brain No One Is Dying
But that’s a lie.
Even you, now, as you read this, are dying.
Science says we can rewire our brain,
make it believe what we say, even if
what we say isn’t true.
It’s called “neuroplasticity.” Or is it?
They say we can lean into the pain,
breathe through it, like childbirth,
reduce the scale from an 8 to a 3.
How we do this is simple, they say:
Instead of telling our brain that Y
always follows X, we tell our brain
something different—and our brain
believes us.
Or does it?
A short survey of questions,
an intake of the body—and
what are you feeling now?
Follow the light. Hold the buzz
in your hands, loosen your grip:
Just go with it, go with it.
Aim slightly below the body, raise the gun
into its flight path, and wait until the barrel
blots out the bird.
Pull.
Hunters say it’s not just for sport.
They say the goal is to limit suffering.
This world doesn’t care about being
humane. Kill or be killed is the name
of the game. Live long enough,
you learn there are only losers.
Doesn’t matter which path you choose.
Head-on, descending, or overhead—
someone will always pull the trigger.
Your parents, a lover, a careless driver,
or Walker Percy’s everyday living
will take a three-inch shell
with one and a quarter ounce load
and BB-size shot and blow you apart.
Lead is cheap but toxic, leaching
into muscles even if the meat
is picked through for pellets.
Steel shot, lighter than lead,
requires extra speed to reach
the same striking force.
For more money, bismuth
gets it right—deforms on impact,
trauma incompatible with life.
The yellow was bright that morning,
some would say too bright, undiluted
by red, like an emoji sun—
the kind people send when it’s going to be a good day.
The waves were dark blue from a distance,
clear around our ankles. You can always see
through the water when you pick it up
in plastic buckets, coquinas burrowing
in the silt.
The dry sand on shore was soft, warm,
how the inside of a stress ball
feels at its core—squishy,
so you can make it take any shape
you want.
And we dug, for hours, tiny shovels
in even tinier hands, stopping only
when our parents made us pause
to slather us in lotion after the last
layer had been washed away
by sweat and trips to the ocean
to refill our buckets.
We were going to build a castle,
eventually. But the moat, we insisted,
must come first. How else would we protect
the castle from invading armies,
the high tide that would swoosh in at dusk?
And it’s easier to build the perfect castle
while standing in the moat than to dig
the moat while trying not to ruin the castle.
And so it was decided.
But the sand was too soft. Too fast.
The moat too deep. And our bodies,
screened against the rays of a bright
yellow sun, too small. The castle
never built, the tide took
the buckets and shovels out to sea.
The Florida International University Pedestrian Bridge Collapse
You can always rely on the news
to bring you disaster—a constant
somber tolling of a bell in the back
of your brain, a reminder that this
morning’s hug may be your last.
The eight lanes of highway were busy,
traffic moving too fast for people to cross
without playing a dangerous game of Frogger
with their life. Wisdom envisioned a bridge,
only for pedestrians, to connect the town
of Sweetwater to the college campus.
What could go wrong in Miami, in 2018?
We have evolved. We know so much.
We know 175 feet of concrete collapsed:
6 cars were crushed, 8 people killed.
The National Transportation Safety Board
concluded there had been a miscalculation
of resistance to sliding, a bad connection
between the walkway surface and the truss
that held it up. Too many cracks, they said
on the news. Too many cracks.
Former Miss Teen Tampa Polishes Her Crown at 92
Slow down long enough to dust off
the photo album, you’ll find ghosts in black
and white: a father whose hands wandered
beyond the law, a mother who crashed
into her children and then a light pole.
A high school fairy tale with the football player,
four children born much too close together.
Only one bathroom and only one car
and a husband gone too long, taking trains
from station to station as the Korean War
rocked the nation, just enough food and not
enough love to ration. Sepia sixties and seventies:
quaaludes and Beatles, Vietnam and the Stones,
one daughter in rehab, another in an unwed
mothers home. Two sons locked in a war
between manhood and being teens . . .
one would die on the dead-end side of dreams.
An album full of glory days, you remember
the way the stage called your name. The lure
of spotlights and opening nights, an Oscar
waiting in the wings—if only you could
get to California, that’s where all the gold is
buried. If only (if only!) you’d never married.
A perennial iris blooms in brilliant purple,
dazzling in the day’s bright light, then petals
fall and the moon calls to an empty garden
yearning for signs of life. Time is still
a-flying, and men still tell women what to do
with their prime. But there’s nothing wrong
with being coy with all the boys. Leave
the rosebuds where they lay—
one lifetime gone, another one awaits.
My darling, there is no insurance
for this life we’re building,
even though there should be,
because everything we love
might be lost. If that’s not
pure risk, what is? But because
there is also so much to gain,
they consider us speculative
risk. I disagree: To think
we can control what happens
is to lie to ourselves.
A bird is sucked into
a propeller, a single lightning
strike sets the woods ablaze.
A zealot unleashes spores,
stray bullets rip through walls
—where is the opportunity
for profit? No one can escape
catastrophe, not entirely.
The best we can do is refuse
to bear the blame—
as if choosing a different
road would not have led
to disaster, as if a right turn
instead of left could stop
the crash. No, my darling. No
matter how well we plan,
losses are inevitable.
But suppose we give up
our imagined sway, let the world
do what it must—as rodents do,
and rebuild this home stick by stick,
each time it’s broken by wind
or washed by flood—then
love is our reward: immeasurable
uninsurable fortune, whether
it’s stolen or we spend it all.
Marissa Glover lives in Florida, where she’s busy swatting bugs and dodging storms. Her poetry collections, Let Go of the Hands You Hold (2021) and Box Office Gospel (2023), are published by Mercer University Press. Her forthcoming book Some Intangible Mercy will be released in early 2027.
