Gods of a Grand Mal
They come
cause grave electrical disturbances in the brain.
I resist resign pass out head to floor forget
all the names and places I knew before.
Between breath and death fading voices of ghosts
someone murmurs She’s lost her color.
Body robbers—
Trust us they say Don’t belong Come with us
And I hear that song repeated at times when a witness to cruelty.
Gods who emit acrid vapors an atmosphere identical to dictators.
A gray silk breath rises like clouds.
I am breathing again and the gold light of dawn
thrums through my fallen body.
From the floor I hear my son singing from his crib.
His voice inspires flowers in new life. I want to live
My family calls me superstitious yet surely the ghost still arrives.
∆ ∆ ∆ ∆ ∆
from some unknown residence place of obscurity
remote sighs.
With faint images like underdeveloped film
an assimilation appears behind windows
whispers itself into curtains.
Mary Morris is the author of three books of poetry, Enter Water, Swimmer, Dear October, and a third, Late Self-Portraits, forthcoming from Michigan State University Press (2022), winner of the Wheelbarrow Books prize, selected by Leila Chatti. She received the Rita Dove Award, Western Humanities Review Mountain West Writer’s Award, New Mexico Discovery Award, New Mexico Women’s Press Award, and has been invited to read her poems at the Library of Congress, which aired on NPR. Her poems appear in Boulevard, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Los Angeles Review, and The Massachusetts Review.