Assistant Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: “The Therapist Asks, How Does the Brain Feel” is an evolving answer, a rickety list, a masterclass in the semicolon. As the poem’s speaker searches for the right metaphor to answer the therapist, images complicate and accrue with increasing urgency: “a spindle with dwindling flax” and “an elevator—its repeatedly pressed buttons.” Propulsive soundwork is productively trapped by Bush’s precise use of punctuation, so that content and form pinball the reader toward the poem’s final pause and crash.
The Therapist Asks, How Does the Brain Feel
How a pillow must feel, when the head;
A squirrel searching for corn or squash in trash cans,
Even clutching strangers’ jeans; legs and arms in jitters;
The nimbo- and altostratus clouds clothing the sky
Before thunder and tropical storms; chaos and the constant
Preparation for chaos; a case back and forth between two courts;
Mass sitting in cerebrospinal fluid; spindle with dwindling flax; vapor
Present in air; magnets beside nickel, sometimes cotton, plastic, glass;
Inkblots bleeding through pages; burning cityscapes; town halls
In snake pits, pessimism; an elevator—its repeatedly pressed buttons,
Upward, downward, and ground floor a blur; deep time,
And earth during; more than swallow and sire, but the proposal,
I paused there, at its premise, incapably; the persistence
Of death’s musk; a deer dashing, a car, person, or its screech.
Prince Bush is a poet in Nashville, Tennessee, with poetry in *82 Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Ghost City Press, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Pleiades: Literature in Context, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. He was a 2019 Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets Fellow.
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