Atonia, Eve of St. Mark
by Ryan Harper
Was a daydream in the unelected silence
of an April afternoon—an exhausted body
shocked still, pinned even upon waking.
But my dark self, was it, tumbled on me
—athletic, flexing, twisting to my center,
neither lost nor settled. Dazed and calm
I saw, was it, the travels of a body
sporting beyond the light themes
of an overlit world—something dark
disclosed, giving notice in its stealth—
something at the just-budging chest
stayed, neither upended nor fixed,
breathless fetched my silence passing over.
—
atonia (noun): loss of muscle tone and function. Normal during deep sleep, it can cause temporary paralysis in an individual whose brain has woken from rest but whose muscles remain in REM sleep mode.
Ryan Harper is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Fairfield University-Bellarmine in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The author of My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018), Ryan has had recent poems and essays in Portland Review, Third Wednesday, Thirteen Bridges, Paperbark, and elsewhere. Ryan is the creative arts editor of American Religion Journal.
