Beth Kanell

Brain Mapping

The first color of the day is sky blue, at the window,

edged with grass green and a marbled pattern of apple leaves.

Wake up, visual cortex. There are too many must-do items

lined up (it’s Saturday) but the blue, blue, blue widens

eyelids, tugs the lips into an arc of pleasure, guides

the lilting calls of morning birds and then an auditory

connect with joy, triggered. Robins’ trills, nagging bluejays,

override of a crow insistent: listen without judgment

while the song of the house wren ripples like French

across the seat of love. Which is also

embedded, glowing, behind the racecourse of reason

and above the reptile brain, which unfolds one leg, the other,

balances the pulse of body and breath. Love is physiologic.

How enchanting, to map the blue, green, and red threads

of call and response, core and ripple. No CAT scan required:

merge bookshelves, make dinner together. We grew up

with maps on paper; slid unquestioning to GPS; the mind,

which is not the same as the brain, yearns to organize,

aches to respond. Love is an action verb, I’ve insisted,

pretending I knew the coordinates to tap.

Rx: Mifepristone

Call it the opposite of welcome home. Say goodbye to

a pulsing clump of cells, before naming. Before failure.

Don’t take this if you are past menopause (instructions say).

Avoid it if you’re ingesting fentanyl, warns the clinic webpage.

Don’t mix with blood thinners, heart failure, internal

yeast prescriptions, or if you’re treating malaria,

or with any drug that lowers cholesterol.

So why would you ever? Listen:

Have you seen those raw little faces?

First you have to notice them, to grieve them:

crusted noses running, cheeks red with rash, fussing

all the time. Sharp slap in the supermarket. Silenced with

rubber nipple on a stiff frame, stuffed between

unwiped lips. Bad baby, someone says; give him some

of this: secondhand smoke from excellent weed,

swig of sweet liquor, Adderall crumb.

Nobody remembers his first words.

In a nearby car, there’s a grandparent linked

to the borrowed safety seat, the box of diapers,

school schedule—signing up for food benefits

lining up for the low-cost clinic, coupons caught, cash

that barely covers store-brand mac & cheese. Child,

don’t outgrow that jacket yet. Short on sleep,

poor choices, no good ones affordable.

Weep for the ones who were never chosen.

Mifepristone tells the womb, Let go.

An after-rape rescue, a “what were we thinking” remedy,

last resort when you’re fighting cancer or genes malfunction,

slamming a sentence of round-the-clock caregivers

and lost jobs, shredded lives, onto the couple that once dared

to dream of sports and schools.

Notice the common side effects:

Sour stomach; back pain; dizziness; the runs. Regret and relief

(though those aren’t on the list). Depression. You contemplate

nine months. Eighteen years. All your linked lives, forever.

Call this a way to wait, a rite to re-route. Faith:

One day may offer a quicker quench. Hope hovers.

Meanwhile: Some days, there’s only mifepristone.

---

Beth Kanell lives in northeastern Vermont among rivers, rocks, and a lot of writers. Her poems seek comfortable seats in small well-lit places.

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Mary Buchinger

Walking the Dog

It’s only a red light / a regular red stoplight / it doesn’t mean what it used to / the crawl across my back? a nerve somewhere sending its regards / from the headlands to the stern there’s a storm inside / and I resent my students who say what they think I want to hear /and I want to tell them don’t you know I’m younger than you / I keep not knowing anything / I want them to know that nothing too /the sparrow worries I’m after its nest when I’m just walking past /please treat the place like you live here / don’t throw chicken bones and nips / birthday cake candles in my garden / isn’t this world also yours / we broke it we own it / a redbud is a redbud even if it never blooms—I need that / and there isn’t a dog in the world except for my Dover at the end of her leash /and I know the car has no intention none whatsoever to stop at the red light / so we wait / wait at the curb  / nothing means what I was told

The Screen

My plane waits for me at the end of a tunnel,

its engines brum, knock of bridled explosions,

fumes, squirts of oil and grease, heads slicked,

free of grit, the metal skin mirrors the sunrise

My coming journey will pummel its steel,

test its jets— what can be dissected

and put together again

What gets larger through collective

experience is made of individual noticings

My student described the white bowl

in the museum and discovered

the orbit of earth, its imperfect round,

the moon with its pitted surface,

and what could I do, but thank her?

When the wonder opened,

I mean, the window, I was somewhere

again finally, my body had an earth

for a whole breath

in a blue sky,

but the passenger beside me closed it,

the sunlight streaming in

obscures his screen, 

everyone but me returns

to their movies, curated movement

of a narrative so unlike

life that spends itself heedlessly,

the little seconds whizzing away here and there,

who’s to say this led to that?

What is text, but probability,

the odds of one word

following another

and the predictable world

goes unfilmed, it’s full of the sleeping

and who wants to watch it?

The brain loves motion and will make a story

Let me say this:

I love to see the shadow of my jet

race across winter trees

Catch me! it says

Catch me if you can!

Spun-Butter Light Smothers The Rust-Tipped Weeds

Dusk

clotted with insects

sipping the last

bit of august

dancers

on the palm

of summer

tulle skirts

net light

little leap

of a season

tipping

into September

and from the underwelt

the click and twirl

of cicadas unwinding

dervishes

of the emptying

---

Mary Buchinger is the author of seven collections of poetry including Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, 2023, Mass Book Award, honors, ) and The Book of Shores (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024).

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Ken Craft

Be Fruitful and Multiply

Newly fascinated with germination, 

my 80-year-old father shows patience—

something Mom says he never had at 23

when planting the seed 

that would blossom into me.

Using thick and calloused hands

that once warmed the handles of hammers, 

wrenches, hacksaws,

Dad carves pineapple leaves from the fruit,

cuts close to the stem,

finds the corona of rust-colored root nodes,

nests them in a bed of potting soil.

Slicing lemons for his bourbon lemonade,

he extracts slippery seeds,

presses them into the peat moss 

and composted bark of a planter, 

considers how his next heir

might be a lemon tree: trunk strong and firm,

leaves green and smooth, 

skin clean and canaried near a citrus

window sunny with southern exposure.

Sometimes It Happens to You

If you’re driving through Alfred,

Dad says, never pick up a hitchhiker

carrying a single bag. Chances are

he was just released from County Jail,

and won’t that be a shit show riding shotgun?

His grease-whorled thumb and forefinger

rotate a glass of Tito’s on the counter.

Turning to my older sister, he adds, a man tries

to talk you into a car, his or yours, no way

you comply. Not under any circumstance.

I don’t care if he’s got a gun to your gut

or a knife sniffing your carotid.

I don’t care if he’s got some bullshit story

about an emergency involving wife

and kids up the road.

Run if you can but scream no matter what—

every ounce you got, y’hear?

Cause you get in that car and he drives off

with you, you’re 97% dead.

Better odds he bolts when you scream,

especially in a parking lot or on a street—

anywhere there’s a chance you’ll be heard.

Under sharp lights, the frost in his Marines

crewcut shines with the same Brylcreem

he’s used since he was fourteen.

And don’t smirk like this will never happen

to you, either. I’m not wasting my breath here!

You need to know how to react

in any situation because shit happens,

and sometimes it happens to you.

I say: Or me. And he tilts the weathered blue

of his eyes my way. Less so to boys, he says,

but who knows anymore in this fucking world.

And swallows two fingers of vodka.

---

Ken Craft is a Maine poet and author of three collections. His poem "The Pause Between" will appear in the Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses 2025 Edition.

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