Because America Is a Place the Brain Makes by Bruce Snider

And there is the place we call home, which is a cell divided

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Because America Is a Place the Brain Makes

by Bruce Snider

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I hold my MRI up to the light, 
lobes like small towns
      glimmering in the ghost -
gray gelatin, blue pines theories 
of mind, ions and 

electricity, dizzy needles 
from which action 
      and experience sing—meaning 
rivers of dopamine 
cut unseen through the trees, and Love 

is a place you can point to—
there—where the cells 
      have hardened 
into impossible stones.
      And there's 

Pleasure. And Greed,
its shores littered with Diet Pepsi cans
      and syringes. Today,
I'm nothing 

but shuttered factories and leafy 
gas pumps, networks 
      of truckers hauling oranges
and Oreos  
     past rehab centers 
and righteous rage. These lands

are stolen lands, barns and silos, 
            the road
signs of excitement, indigestion,
fear. Somewhere 

I keep flooding, though I'm taken 
     by drought. I am 
           lit. I am legible
fig and lemon, salt block 
      and soybean field. And though 

my brain makes everything—funky
taste of marijuana 
      smoke, crunch of 
dirt beneath my feet—I am 

its crumbling municipalities,
      its war machines. I'm 
the carnage of 
its cranes and wrecking balls. And there 
            is a church 
steeple rising. And there is the place

we call home, which is a cell 
      divided, which is America 
under a sky as vast 
as pain, its clouds arguing
      for the high 
unmown grass, sweetness, rain. 

First published in Copper Nickel, Issue 41. Fall 2025.