Vasoconstriction -by E.G. Cunningham

What trickle-down, tear-drop, upside pear

it’s been. How innumerable the goings,

how tightly interwoven, boredom:

the sledging-through & chest bludgeoning

of a year. Not that you’d been. Land moved

under our feet & we didn’t know

what to call it.

           

The opposite of this bounding is not liberation.

But when I’d gotten there,

to another part of the heart-globe—

that cannot be described in language,

can only be described through language—

I stopped.

Buckled under, under the bone saw

lub-dub such shifting induces. I promised

to come back. To talk to the house.

But obsessed about what America tastes like,

instead. That’s what I’m painting:

a kind of mental water-treading

that’s hard to let go of for fear of drowning.

Land shifting under feet

& that’s called water.

Cope has many definitions—

what are the motions needed

for swimming through it?

  

----

E.G. Cunningham's poems have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, Drunken Boat, Poetry London, SAND Journal, Propeller Magazine, and other journals. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia in Athens. 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  ?