Birthday
My lack of a mind’s eye means I experience
memories
as concepts or words or feelings, which
never translate
into images. What exists behind my lids
is like primordial
energy resistant to photorealistic counting:
five absent sheep
the same as twenty. A friend sees gruesome
scenes of wreckage,
blood recalled against her will. I am not sure
I could stand
to picture this gladiatorial world. My blankness
is a blessing
and a loss.I can not summon the faces of
my husband and son,
nor my departed father, whose birthday
is today. When I close
my eyes, the dark is like the back room
of a windowless bakery
where I intuit racks of loaded sheet pans. If I
had an inner projector,
I imagine I wouldn’t rely so heavily
on canticle or sorcery,
but how then would I recognize myself? I have
been both deathbed
photographer and phrenologist, aware that
features evanesce
the moment I look away. Even vistas must
persist by some means other
than visual, so my aphantasia becomes
generative of mountains.
I have learned to appreciate this inability to
position a horse in my mind
or envision its glistening coat in the
processional.
Alicia Rebecca Myers's poetry has appeared in publications that include River Styx, Sixth Finch, and Rattle. Her chapbook of poems, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press, 2016), was winner of the Mineral Point Chapbook Series. Her first full-length manuscript, Warble, was recently chosen by former Kansas Poet Laureate Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg as winner of the 2024 Birdy Poetry Prize (Meadowlark Press) and will be published in 2025. She lives with her husband and nine year old in upstate NY. You can learn more at https://www.aliciarebeccamyers.com