Red Eye Steve Bellin-Oka Bright crimson smear in the sclera. Overflow of a miniature river’s cataracts into the ovoid pool of black pupil, blue iris, clear lens. I almost never look at my face in a mirror—so someone asks, what happened to your eye? What hasn’t. Violent sneeze, burst vessels. Once I abraded the cornea when by mistake I rubbed sand into it. Maybe I was trying to make glass. Sister, on the all-night flight from Vancouver to Baltimore where you lay dying, I took a window seat so I could both see and not see, hologram of the reading light fixed above the jet wing. In Polaroids of us at the beach as kids, our eyes burn red as coal embers, as unchecked fever.
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