Jen Karetnick | My Son's First Brain | Poets Resist

Jen Karetnick is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize, and four poetry chapbooks. The winner of the 2017 Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the 2016 Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize and the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, she has had work appear recently in Amuse-Bouche/Lunch Ticket, Crab Orchard Review, Cutthroat, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, One, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Prime Number Magazine, Spillway, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily and Waxwing. New work is forthcoming in Cigar City Poetry Journal, Every Day Poems, JAMA, New Millennium Writings, and Salamander. She is co-editor of the daily online literary journal, SWWIM Every Day (@SWWIMmiami). Jen received an MFA in poetry from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in fiction from University of Miami.

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Also by Jen Karetnick: Brie Season American Sentencing The Treasures That Prevail

Poets Resist
Edited by Krista Cox
July 7, 2018

Jen Karetnick

My Son's First Brain

When it’s opened, he says, the brain smells like corn chips, although he’s not sure

if it’s the brain’s tornadic tissue, a spectrum of dusk, emitting the odor, or the drill used

to section away the brain’s shield, an ice cube from a tray, gauzy dust rising from

the bone flap to greet his mask, signal his own brain: Tostitos. At 17, my son wields

the vocabulary of the brain surgeon he shadows like a scalpel, slicing into the differences

between a cyst and a brain tumor as he tells me about his day, rooting in the refrigerator

for leftover cheese ravioli — those crimped, supple brains. Framed by the interior bulb,

brain of the icebox, he is a skeleton inside scrubs. Sea-green, they fall from his shoulders

and hips, an amniotic wash rushing the cut, brainless, refusing to cuff. Later, his father,

who has treated the brain his entire career but has never seen one pulsing its red

tide on a table before him, will show him how, near his other wrinkled brains, to roll

the pants at the waist after tying off. Later, this boy, who tricked his brain at 7 by hanging

upside down from the top of the couch as if it were a branch, lobe of a tree’s brain,

to watch SpongeBob SquarePants, will play Beer Pong as if to destroy brain cells

that I sacrificed 9 months of medication to grow, and I’ll follow doctor’s orders, put my brain on

dimmer switch, shred the tight green brains of cannabis into something flammable

in hopes that it’ll calm the illness that’s guided by its own brain, though nerveless

and never-ending, trench deep. For now, I cut mangoes away from their stony brains,

staring at the brain of the sink, thinking all day long about the thousands of young

brains misfiring, emotions stunted as cactus, in chicken wire cages, parents wracking

their brains to get their children back. Separation is our heritage, too, and our future.

Like most organs, the brain does not scale isometrically but allometrically, though it can

shrink with age, dehydration. I watch my son fill the body that feeds the brain that will

fix brains someday, spoon him salsa without chilies so he won’t sweat, don’t offer chips.