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Migraine Madrigal

By Lisa Russ SpaarDecember 30, 2017

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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.




¤


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).

LARB Contributor

Lisa Russ Spaar is a contemporary American poet, professor, and essayist. She is currently a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia and the director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Vanitas, Rough: Poems, and Satin Cash: Poems. Her most recent book is Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (Persea, 2021), and her debut novel, Paradise Close, was published by Persea in May 2022. Her poem “Temple Gaudete,” published in IMAGE Journal, won a 2016 Pushcart Prize.

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