Ode to Retinal Imaging
Don't blink, you remind yourself
by Isaac Fox
This lightning turf
green grid sweeps
through your eyes,
quick yet inevitable
as a beam from above yanking
a dairy cow into some silent bubble
in the lower atmosphere.
Don’t blink, you remind
yourself, but how
can it be so hard to know
if your eye has
closed for some minuscule moment?
But then but then but then
the pictures. And you learn
the back of your eyeball
contains a sky veined
April-maple green, you learn
a dim yellow sun sets there to paint
half the sky in blood, you learn two
nebulas float
inside your face, framed
by jagged peaks or by
towering fangs, you learn
your eyelids are soil-deep cosmic
jaws, and you learn
your eyes are doing just fine
at least
until next year.
Isaac Fox writes stuff, plays clarinet and guitar, and spends as much time as possible outside. His work has previously appeared in Bending Genres, Tiny Molecules, and A Velvet Giant. You can find him on Bluesky at @isaac-k-fox.bsky.social.
