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      January 10, 2022On Looking at an MRI Cross-SectionMelissa Balmain

      actual photo below

      Inside my head, I learn, a horseshoe crab
      stares heavenward with jumbo-olive eyes
      (the pitted kind), each in an ice cream cone
      webbed like a goose’s foot. Between them flies
      bright looping wire.
      And past each ice cream cone, a marbled slab
      of glossy, skinless chicken-off-the-bone
      spreads like a wing. Behind the meat and flab?
      A gown for those who like their skirts outsize
      and half on fire.
       
      So this is it: from fruit to flaming dress
      hums every memory I’ve kept since birth—
      each love and hate, each lesson I’ve been taught
      and not ejected,
      each town, cafe, or weedy patch of earth,
      each brilliant scheme or idiotic thought.
      In other words, it’s just the sort of mess
      I’d have expected.
       
      eBalmainBrain

      from #74 – Winter 2021

      Melissa Balmain

      “After the shock of peering inside my skull, my need to write felt almost medical. Finding words for what I’d seen, and a poetic form to suit it, somehow helped me cope with the bizarreness of it all. As for the fact that the freaky object in the photo wrote the poem? Or that the ‘I’ that realized this fact is also the freaky object? I’m still wrapping my freaky object around both of those.”

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