Kelly Dolejsi
My First Migraine
At age 6 I lay awake in bed and stared
at my first migraine, believing it was a ghost,
a dead girl skipping in pink and desperate
twinkling lights. Neither of us had a sister
so we became friends. We climbed inside
in a dizzy bloom of lilacs and drove far away,
though everything was still farther away,
and the shifting blank warped violet and soft
when we landed. Now that I am her mother,
she comes crying to the checkered slice of river
in my room, and I raise a glass of wild light
to her borderless lips, and how does it find me,
all this gloss, while the black-out curtains admit
only the scissory trill of strangers in the leaves?
Kelly Dolejsi’s work has been published in Cincinnati Review, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, West Texas Literary Review and Timberline Review, among other journals. Her poem “Loyalty” was nominated for the Best of the Net (2017), and Desert Willow Press published her chapbook, That Second Starling, earlier this year. A graduate of Emerson College in Boston, she now lives in Los Alamos, NM, with her husband and daughters.