Cameron Morse: In and Out of Total Eclipse
Gray Scale
Slipping the disc from Saint Luke’s
into my laptop, I take
a God’s-eye view of my brain,
zoom in and out of my angel skull,
my oval of boneshine and its wrinkled
labyrinth. My lopsided eyeballs lapse
in and out of total eclipse, white goblin
ears lengthen and my nose falls off,
growing back, the beak
of a pelican. Black ventricles of spinal fluid
spread into butterfly wings
on a Rorschach test and recede
into silkworms. How tiny the tumor
seems from up here, the wisp of my first
white hair, the wisp of a cobweb.
Cameron Morse taught and studied in China. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2014, he is currently a third-year MFA candidate at UMKC and lives with his wife, Lili, in Blue Springs, Missouri. His poems have been or will be published in over 50 different magazines, including New Letters, pamplemousse, Fourth & Sycamore and TYPO. His first collection, Fall Risk, is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press.
