Self Portrait of the Patient as a Murmuration of Starlings

 
I fingerprint the sky

Take the nearest exit

 

(& they are legion)

)& they are without relent(

 

My racing mind

 

& its multitudes

& its voices

 

Becomes portent

 

What I’m trying to say is

What I’m trying to say is

 

I seek a guidance system

 

To be pilot not passenger

Primal not prey
 
 
 

Avery Moselle Guess received a 2015 NEA Fellowship for Poetry. She’s a PhD student at USD and assistant editor for poetry at South Dakota Review. Recent publications include poems in Thrush, Rogue Agent, Glass, Rust + Moth, and Deaf Poets Society and creative non-fiction in Entropy and The Manifest-Station. Her chapbook, The Patient Admits, is forthcoming from dancing girl press in summer 2017, and her first full-length collection of poetry will be published in April 2019 by Black Lawrence Press.