Vertigo

Vertigo slips discs, baby on my hip, my body leaning towards sunrise, the soles of my feet trying to grip the bowing and rolling of earth, and uprooted nails in hardwood floors 

Bluejay scratching at the cloud over head, laundry line ghosts escape a flutter of life, a gasp of bleach and sex, my hair suns a perfume of wood sage and sea salt, the sunlight plays theatrics with my eyelids, blood screen and the spinning of my head 

Deaf on my left, tunneled on my right, I melt and fade, I’m streaked with paint and surrealist chords, notes addressed to dreams and a pillow cell-dyed by leaking gray matter 

I try webbing sentences, words ballooning on silk, gaining distance and silence, until only I know the destination met 

I’m behind the wheel, blind in the dark, baby directing green means go red means stop, and the headlights are a funnel cloud of a child’s interpretation of God, and the head-on collision with the eyes in the rear view mirror, something’s made a home in the abyss of my pupil, it siren songs my heart 

Fingers and dimes and magnolia pink nights, porcupine quills holding my hair in a knot 

Screech owl nocturne and a vixen in heat, my eyes adjusting to new vertices, all and more, I learned myself as a baby, are things that terrify and write a devil’s sonnet to beauty

E.A. O'Connell