Tempest in the Cerebellum

in Dog Days of Poetry Poetry on July 11, 2022 April 21, 2025

I fell. On a flat sidewalk on a snowless, iceless, sun-streaked afternoon. No impetus of flail: palms, then elbows in catch of concrete, then belly, knees, & pinch of chin in aftershock; a body in sweep of inertia held close to gravity’s chest: mother’s arms missing my touch. Slow motion in the blink, blink of eyelids processing scene: I lay, blocks from my destination, visible to the lawns, visible to those behind hedges & panes & corneas & lenses & retinas & optic nerves—cerebellum failing, too, momentarily in trance. How we can’t think ourselves outside the physical limbs & muscles & organs & flesh that circumvent us through time & space. We are our own riddle’s riddle. We, delicacy thrown. What are we: Egg? Or moment of hatch? Shell seconds before crack? Beak inside—peck, peck, peck? Comb & wattle: a future maturation? Hen in incubation? Hen in whisper of lay? I lay—a display—mainly a repository amid my own tempest of brain in whir & burrow. I can’t remember the seconds on ground, minutes even. I remember seeing foxglove, blooms of bells enticing; how compounds of berries used to treat heart failure—ingestion effects similar to that of unregulated heart medicine. Mind, not unlike the foxglove: three parts beauty on the verge of one part toxicity. I wanted to blame. I wanted to blame the light rail for ten seconds later; I wanted to blame the sidewalk for unevenness, for cracks or shoddy craftsmanship; I wanted to blame the word craftsmanship & all patriarchal undertones & why constantly on guard cycles & cycles; I wanted to blame the heat, the desert for taking & absorbing my liquid, making my ankles & feet swell; I wanted to blame my dormant clitoris, the lack of orgasms, yearning for a person 500 miles away at the foothills of the Rockies; I wanted to blame the tingling in my throat & chest for being another brown woman as spectacle; I wanted to blame a god, an Old Testament god, for the story of gardens & snakes & ovaries & blood as fault lines & all metaphors of the fall; I wanted to blame discoveries of new black holes for not sucking me in & up just bit more; I wanted to blame discovery & lack of a brief pause, how only if my attention diverted, how one second behind; how one second behind. I turned over & sat up to a Chihuahua barking five feet from me, squatting as if to pee. I barked back. Just once. We both got up, walked away part bruised, part satisfied.

Image: Photo by Melani Sosa, via Unsplash.

Felicia Zamora

Felicia Zamora’s books include, I Always Carry My Bones, 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize winner (2021), Quotient (April 2022), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner. A CantoMundo and Ragdale Foundation fellow, she won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry and the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Guernica, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.

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