Inquietude
The body doesn’t lie.
Once a great breath
visited me. Nitric chill
filling my room sour.
Not animal—not skunk
though, if spooked, they’d spray
their sulfurous mist
into the summery darkness.
It was as if a snow globe, drained
of its solution enveloped me—
how sharp the air & walls.
When I’d lower my lids,
a wind tunnel funneled my head.
The sheet slinked from me,
pooled on the floor.
I’d gather it up but it’d slip
from me. If I opened my eyes,
monastic silence rinsed me.
All quieted, an injury
to the air. Like a sleepwalker,
like an insomniac
fish, I fell asleep wide-eyed.
So leviathan were my eyes
when I woke, I had to blink
& blink back the scales
of a thousand centuries contained
in the few hours that that body
of night was. Like trying
to capture a waterfall
in a thimble
or straining a blizzard
with a cheesecloth.
Tinnitus. Or some other
diagnoses. Autohypnosis.
Sleep-paralysis. Pain meat.
& not some ghost
descending upon me.
Not lungs. Nostrils
widening. I told no one.
Fur in my mouth.
Sand funneling
my ears.
After all,
the body doesn’t lie.
Flower Conroy Punch Drunk Press’s third Featured Woman Poet this August! She is the author of the chapbooks Facts About Snakes & Hearts; The Awful Suicidal Swans; and Escape to Nowhere. Her poetry has appeared in American Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle and other journals. She is the current Poet Laureate of Key West.
Featured image by Eberhard Grossgasteiger
