THE BRAIN PUZZLE
At the bottom of the basement stairs
a single bulb hung from wooden beam.
Off limits, her father said,
his power saws mounted like steel surgeons,
ready to amputate a curious child's arm.
She tugged on the string.
A bleached shaft of light
seeped through the airborne dust.
For her sixth-grade science project,
she traced a brain onto quarter-inch plywood,
her cuts jagged, and smudged with blood.
Holding each piece to the light,
Cerebrum, Medulla, Cerebellum.
Magical sounds for the fleshy folds where
her father's life sentence hovered.
Biology book open, she lifted transparent layers
where arrows pointed to senses--
Touch, memory, panic, fear.
Deep into the Hypothalamus, she dove
for an arrow to expose the soul.
Somewhere across the grey
of her father's convoluted brain
a tumor grew toward madness--
boiled inside his skull like rage.
Later, his head bulged
and he cried for weeks on end
while she wondered how
a soul submitted so easily
to the electrical impulses of flesh.
His brain explained none of this
as synapses leaped hidden chambers
where too much had already been decided.
Those mysteries of epinephrine, impulse and soul.
She had no power over them,
no matter how hard she tried
to cut them out, label their parts,
and hold them accountable.
a single bulb hung from wooden beam.
Off limits, her father said,
his power saws mounted like steel surgeons,
ready to amputate a curious child's arm.
She tugged on the string.
A bleached shaft of light
seeped through the airborne dust.
For her sixth-grade science project,
she traced a brain onto quarter-inch plywood,
her cuts jagged, and smudged with blood.
Holding each piece to the light,
Cerebrum, Medulla, Cerebellum.
Magical sounds for the fleshy folds where
her father's life sentence hovered.
Biology book open, she lifted transparent layers
where arrows pointed to senses--
Touch, memory, panic, fear.
Deep into the Hypothalamus, she dove
for an arrow to expose the soul.
Somewhere across the grey
of her father's convoluted brain
a tumor grew toward madness--
boiled inside his skull like rage.
Later, his head bulged
and he cried for weeks on end
while she wondered how
a soul submitted so easily
to the electrical impulses of flesh.
His brain explained none of this
as synapses leaped hidden chambers
where too much had already been decided.
Those mysteries of epinephrine, impulse and soul.
She had no power over them,
no matter how hard she tried
to cut them out, label their parts,
and hold them accountable.