Dana Wall

Theory of Half-Things

In the space between awake and not,
my teeth become pearls become rain
become the sound of your name
dissolving in mercury light.
This is how objects betray us:
slowly, then all at once—
coffee cup growing legs,
clock hands eating their own time,
shower drain speaking in tongues
we almost understand.

The doctors call it temporal lobe
epilepsy, this way things slip
their definitions, how a fork
can suddenly remember it was once
part of a star, how my hands
forget they're not birds.

Last Tuesday, I watched
my mother's face become
a map of countries that don't
exist anymore, her smile
a border dispute, her eyes
the place empires go to die.

They say naming something
gives you power over it,
but what about the things
that exist between labels—
the taste of almost-rain,
the weight of never-was,
the sound a mirror makes
when it stops believing?

Sometimes I wake to find
my body has migrated
to the ceiling, leaving behind
a shell of approximate flesh.
The cat sees me but won't say
which version is real.

This might be a poem
about illness, or memory,
or the way things become
their own opposites when
we look at them too long,
like words repeated past meaning.

Tonight, the moon is either
a hole in the sky
or a door or a theory
of temporary light.
I am either writing this
or becoming it.

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Dana Wall traded profit margins for poetry margins after thirty years in corporate finance. She holds an MBA and an MFA from Goddard College, where she studied the intersection of memory and metaphor. Now writing full-time from her home in Manhattan Beach, she explores the spaces between ordered and chaotic systems, between the concrete world of numbers and the fluid realm of language. Her work examines themes of transformation, liminality and the unexpected ways we navigate between states of being.