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Dawn McGuire USA  Dawn McGuire has three poetry collections, the most recent of which, The Aphasia Cafe, won the 2013 Indie Book Award for Poetry and is a Small Press Distribution (SPD) best seller. She grew up in eastern Kentucky and was educated at Princeton University, Union Theological Seminary, and Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her poems have appeared in various literary magazines, anthologies, and poetry features of medical journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the Journal of American Neurology. McGuire has won numerous poetry awards, including the Sarah Lawrence/Campbell Corner Academy of Language Exchange Poetry Prize for "poems that treat larger themes with lyric intensity." She is a neurologist, neuroscientist, and mother. The Aphasia Cafe is available at http://www.spdbooks.org.
I Sleep in my Clothes
Is stroke the
right word?
Some Zen monk with a name like a skin disease said: A word never put a cloud in the sky. So? It’s important to have the right one. Stroke’s right— Struck down by a god Attic, apoplectic, hurling a bolt. * Sunday I had a fit over the Times crossword. Woke up, head shaved, clot dissolved, the doctor pink with pleasure . . . “no weakness whatsoever, just some visual—“
his hand waving all around—
My head hurts like hell. * All my fingers, all my toes, arms, legs, shoulders, hips, ok.
Ok, I can swim. Ok, I can
talk.
Methodist-Episcopal. No ifs, ands or buts
I understand the lesion
split apart my splenium
the little u-joint between hemispheres
with its cow-part on some menu in Paris
I can’t read.
* I can’t read. Not even what I write. Write/read—
cleaved
like the pillars of Hercules.
What is this:
eneirdingadoralzone—?
I wrote it.
I’m reading it.
I was a literate man.
I was.
*
Working through the sports
page
letter by letter is like stringing beads. By the end of the sentence I don’t care who blew the save. My wife says I’m depressed. Words. You know what it’s like?
I go to the page as to her
body.
But I can’t feel her move. I can’t hear her
call my name.
© Copyright, 2015,
Dawn McGuire. |