Migraine Madrigal

This poem appears in the LARB Print Quarterly Journal: No. 16,  Art

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Migraine Madrigal

A thug lurking in umbral headzone
forgotten between episodes. Null
weight of glass afoot in the skull.
Nudge to remember the forgotten,

the undone, black tree trunks fallen
decades ago shifting now behind one eye. 
Why did they fall unheard, the sky
above a contorted, contracting dome?

Then the wait, visible, until pain cinches up
the brain. Welcome, acrid scalp jewel.
Dark familiar with numb knell
of bleed-out, of stroke, forecasting

the moment a lid lifts at last into absence,
music resumes, & dancing. Until it doesn’t.

 

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Lisa Russ Spaar is the author/editor of over 10 books of poetry and criticism, most recently Orexia: Poems (Persea, 2017) and Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson (UVA Press, 2016).

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