“Signs and symptoms of acoustic neuroma are often easy to miss,” Mayo Clinic
Sometimes I miss the vertigo, which would spin
my world like that giant wheel on The Price is Right
and where I’d land was anybody’s guess but sure
to be expensive. There are moments when I miss
the strange pulsations of a migraine as my brain
would stretch itself, on the move, searching for new
country out beyond the white fence of my cranium.
And these days I often miss the way my tinnitus
would bloom as if on cue during another tedious
faculty meeting, my inner ear’s radio turning its dial,
a soft buzz of static growing into symphonic ringing
that drowned out the dull administrative monotones,
while I sat there like a dog whining at faraway sirens
only I could hear.
–
Evan Gurney is an English professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He is the author of Love’s Quarrels: Reading Charity in Early Modern England (UMass Press, 2018), and his poems and essays have appeared recently in Appalachian Review, Contrary, storySouth, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.