panic attack on 

there's a crackling beneath your skin:

hair exposed to dry air

an unwanted kind of electricity

everything stands—

on end, on edge

there's an atomic swerve in the core of you

and your being vibrates

faster than a tuning fork 

in a sound experiment

you teeter now—

maybe forever  

fly! or fall, will you!

a switch caught mid-flip

now, a heart-on collision between 

your ribcage and the organ 

it homes 

your heart has been totaled and is only 

crushed junk in the wreck

yard of your body

you un-focus your eyes and 

shrink everything into an absence

this candle of a body

is burning a crater into itself.

Sekinat Oladeji is a writer whose works capture the complexity and fluidity of the human condition in both form and language. She writes poems in dancing forms and creates fictional worlds that blur the illusional black-and-whiteness of the world into a realer gray. She tweets maniacally @amoonaffair.