A-Z Challenge: E is for Eager, Eye

Well, I am sick. Even sicker than yesterday. but here are my E entries for the challenge:

My husband and I rehabilitated a baby squirrel who was so eager for his bottle we named him Eager.

He was successfully released into the wild.

And, for national poetry month, a poem for E:

Eye

I live inside the eye. Vacuous, lost

in a steaming, sulfurous wasteland, we stare, the eye

and I. Drifts of exhaustion fog a window otherwise so clear

that it appears unglazed. Hot, red and dry,

the eye and I watch the frayed edges of dreams

unwind and pool in holographic puddles. Twitching,

little scenes surround us, paint

drips of smeared color and spastic motion

into our peripheral vision. We want to dive

into lost reveries, to be swallowed by their promise of sleep,

but they shimmer and fade when we reach for them. Our lids

scorch open. I try not to see the teeth growing

inside the maw of eye. The iris shreds into spears;

its hissing-‘possum jaws show numerous canines. I refuse

to notice the eye’s hunger. Already in its belly, my scales

slip off and fall in multicolored rain. Hydrochloric acid dissolves

them, liberates their swirling hues. The tapeworm insomnia

swims free in the amniotic fluid, in the home of dreams,

in the small death of sleep.

Mary Stebbins Taitt

This is a new poem, still in progress. You can see, perhaps, how it related to being sick.