The descriptions Percival Everett uses in his poems, “The Dura Mater,” and “The Weight of the Encephalon,” are some of the most accurate descriptions I have read to describe migraines. I have been suffering from migraines since I was about about 11 years old, and sometimes they can be incredibly debilitating. When I get migraines, it’s as if someone turned up the volume on all of my senses — everything I see is too bright and saturated, every noise grates against my ears, and anything I try to eat makes me incredibly nauseous — all I can focus on is the pain and dizziness.
In “The Dura Mater,” the poem opens with the stanza, “Dense and inelastic, fibrous, lining the inner/wall of my skull, thick where the headaches live.” My headaches usually manifest in the same spot and because I get headaches often, it’s easy to think that my headaches “live” there. I can point to the spot on my forehead where my migraines always happen, which makes them pretty predictable. In “The Weight of the Encephalon,” the first line, “My head hurts the way it hurts,” is very relatable for me. About an hour before I get a migraine, I can “sense” that it’s coming, but the pain of my migraine is hard to describe. Usually, I say that it feels like someone is squeezing my brain, but that’s not entirely accurate. My head hurts the way it hurts — my migraine pain doesn’t feel like a regular headache or a pain somewhere else on the body, making it hard to describe to a person who has never experienced them. Like how the speaker states, “The pain weighs as much, just more than 3 pounds,/rolling like a great round stone from floor to roof.” My migraines make me aware of how heavy my brain actually is inside my skull, and I can feel it move whenever I turn my head. Most of the time I need to lay down to try and get this to subside because my head is too heavy to try and hold myself. The last stanza says, “Thirteen ounces for every eight hours,/during which I trace the topography with a match.” I interpret this as the amount of time it takes for the headaches to go away. It’s hard to focus on anything other than my migraine when I have one, so it makes me feel better when I try to measure how much my migraine subsides over a period of time. It helps motivate me to get up and not let the headache win.
Because most of the poems are sexual in “(Body),” I’m not sure if migraines are what Percival Everett meant to describe in “The Dura Mater,” and “The Weight of the Encephalon.” However, when I read these poems for the first time I immediately saw my pain reflected in them. Sometimes I find it really hard to articulate how my headaches feel, which is frustrating because I get them so often. For me, these poems perfectly describe my experiences of getting migraines.