When They Told Me My Brain Was a Cloud

by Natasha Burge

Bahador

In the room with the clawback ceiling they gave me the serious news that my brain was a cloud. I minded their mouth, the muffled lunge of their tongue, and I studied the way they molded their words with bindings of mundane truth. The facts: I saw the world as a magical world, that for reasons of blood or salt or mineral imbalance, my mind revisioned itself in endlessly spiraling permutations of radiance. This was my factor, my secret contribution, and I accepted it. // But no, this was wrong, they corrected themselves, your brain is a field of clouds, a network of bodily condensations. I took this to mean that my task was unfinished, that there were deserts of dry to scour with my wet. I spoke this aloud and shackles of light peeled from my tongue, cavities of the blackest brilliance. A door in a distant hallway was unlocked, a murmur for help. They left before they returned and when they did they carried a stablefull of pharmaceuticals to smooth the garbled child. // But no, this too was wrong, they corrected themselves, your brain is a cycle, it is the whole procession incarnate, the suck of the dark soil, the rushing feed of rivers, the wide open spackle of a sky-stained sea, this and this and this are within you, the clotted nimbus that circles the sun, the downy halo shading the moon, and the fine crackling fire of day-soaked stars. In the wake of these revelations I went to this cloud, to this field that was a network that was a cycle that was the breath of a deeply felted light, and through the lapse of my borders, the gentle yield of their dew, I found what they spoke of—the tributes of rapt confusion I poured upon the world. It was, I conceded, a private haunt of miracles, a study in the most singular of magics.

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Natasha Burge is a Puschart Prize and Best of the Net nominated writer from the Arabian Gulf. Previously the writer-in-residence of the Qal’at al Bahrain Museum, she is currently pursuing a PhD and working on a novel. Her work can be found in The Smart Set, Roads & Kingdoms, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Syntax & Salt, and Forge Literary Magazine, among others. www.natashaburge.com