Abriana Jetté

Research Suggests Significance
of Cortical Depression

Commuting home from work one night I thought
I could die right there on the bus from the pain.
Another day inside fluorescent light computer
screen corporate speak triggering something
that had to be released. Nearly faint, holding on
to the rail, I unzipped my purse and threw up inside it.
Phone and keys. Two books. Some magazines.
No one noticed; New Yorkers. At eighteen months,
my daughter is used to seeing her mother with her head in the toilet
then catatonic in bed. Warm towel on my head.
I can survive seventy-two hours foggy, groggy, going
along with the daily clean wash fold drive coffee students
dinnertime bathstorybedtime before I put two
and two together. Too late for triptan. Cells swell
nerves shook the whole system exhausted.
Nauseated. Maybe it’s me never satisfied, suffering rooted
inside rotting any other instinct other than to tend
or host or take care, and not because I like it.
Ask any psychiatrist. Besides it’s not the trauma inside me
I’m trying to tame, but the eye throbbing neuron wave
rush of blood in the head chemical combustion or
whatever it is that happens when I’m under migraine brain.

Abriana Jetté’s writing has appeared in places like PLUME Poetry Journal, the Seneca Review, The Moth, Poetry New Zealand and more; likewise, she has received fellowships to the Southampton Writers Conference, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and the Sewanee Writers Conference, as well as other places. In addition to her creative work, she is the editor of five anthologies of poetry.