Karen Carter’s Deep Dive reveals healing and hope.

A memoir in poetry, these poems travel from the safe space of therapy in Oklahoma, where the poet plunges into an ocean of grief and hits rock bottom.

She develops courage during decades of adulthood, exploring a path through redemptive suffering.

In the sanctuary of her front porch in rural North Carolina and in the remote every dayness of a schoolteacher during COVID, she sits with sorrow.

She takes a deep dive into the ordinary, natural world and experiences the inner and outer world joined together without shame.

Finally, at the Outer Banks, North Carolina, the victim tosses the loss and the pain of violence done to her body and mind into the sea.

Finding spiritual power to rise from trauma’s depth, the poet cherishes new life in the present and hope in all eternity.

An older woman like me inserts a key card into a cube.
But the door to her hotel room
will not open.
Mine will.
I pull back the curtains,
see overcast skies.
The ocean lures me.

A long time ago, at age 35,
 broke down.
I was drowning in despair.
I took a deep dive,
headed all the way down
to the bottom of life’s ocean floor
to heal from childhood trauma,
including sexual abuse.
Tossed here and there, I
no longer wanted closed doors,
where broken seashells cut to my core.

Through the decades, the waves crashed.
Would the currents stabilize me,
nurture new life between the surface
and the deep ocean?
Staying in recovery, I changed—gained
wavelengths, wind speed, and new direction.
Wind breath lifted me,
carried dead cargo into the sea.

Healing from trauma is a long-hard thing.
Now, nearly 70, I visit the ocean.
My fragmented seashells restored,
I am transforming into new patterns,
opening doors.
I watch the points of the crested waves sparkle
in the night. They shine even brighter in the darkness.

I return to my hotel room.
I see the older woman I saw
earlier in the day, now standing
at her door, ready to enter.
She says, “I had the wrong room.”

-Karen Carter

​Published March 10, 2025 in Tiny Seed Literary Journal
https://tinyseedjournal.com/
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Karen Carter Karen Carter is a poet, writer, and educator. With a B.A., M.Div. and PhD, she teaches English and Creative Writing. Her full-length poetry collection, Deep Dive, (Querencia Press 2024), includes poems previously published in Tiny Seed. She lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.