"Migraines have their say" by Teri Ellen Cross Davis

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February 26, 2024 

Migraines have their say

Teri Ellen Cross Davis
Whitney cottage, Hermitage Artist Retreat

You could write about the windows
all nine of them. You could write about 

the gulf, red tide strangling Florida’s 
shore, the opaque eyes of dead fish

caught in the algal bloom. You could write 
about the sky—long as a yawn, sky blue

chasing cerulean away, stretched wisps
of white determined to be the canvas 

for another sunset showstopper. But the body
has its own narrative in mind. Neurons hustling 

pain blank out any page. No writing can be done 
when an electric snare corrals the brain. No ear 

searching for song while one temple pulses 
an arrhythmic lament. Mercifully there’s triptan, 

a black curtain over this inflammatory act. Strike
through today, uncap the pen again tomorrow.

Copyright © 2024 by Teri Ellen Cross Davis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 26, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I was diagnosed with migraines at thirteen. Before the breakthrough of triptans for treatment, I had to lie down for roughly three days in darkness with an ice pack. Now, with medication, when a migraine arrives, I only lose half a day to a full day to the pain. To have a migraine while attending an artist’s retreat felt like a special kind of theft of the time I had arranged away from work and family. I wanted to capture the tension between the migraine’s will and my own, how I sought to find inspiration in a darker moment.”
—Teri Ellen Cross Davis

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is a Black American poet and the author of a more perfect Union (Mad Creek Books, 2021), winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, and Haint (Gival Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She was a Cave Canem Fellow and currently works for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

a more perfect Union
(Mad Creek Books, 2021)

“Everyone Gasps with Anxiety” by Jeni Olin
read more

“Dear Migraine,” by Gail Mazur
read more

Thanks to Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Jeffers’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.
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