Brain Cells
When you’re young
you don't think about
marijuana,
how it might pass through time
into children before they’re born,
destined to fly,
the need to swoop.
You don't understand this flight pattern,
struggle with your own blueprint,
its ability to sharpen or fade,
maybe without choice
maybe because you were too young,
faulty in design,
instructions
waiting
to be written.
When the reckoning comes,
you might hear it in the forming of waves,
carry it at first without knowing,
until your children become an echo
heard as a child: a neighbor’s voice bouncing
off the cement foundation of a house
you grew up in.
It’s hard to accept Yasmine Hurd’s
hypothesis: that THC can seep through
generations, altering adult children’s lives.
Without direct exposure, even
grandchildren could plunge.
Then you understand:
what was illusion
is already real,
sounds
on your left
come from
the right.
Sparked by a TIME magazine article entitled, "The Great Pot Experiment."
Theresa Senato Edwards has written two full-length poetry books—Voices Through Skin (Sibling Rivalry Press) and Painting Czeslawa Kwoka ~ Honoring Children of the Holocaust (unbound CONTENT), an award-winning collaboration with Painter Lori Schreiner—and two poetry chapbooks: Green (Finishing Line Press and Another New Calligraphy) and The Music of Hands (Seven CirclePress, web book edition; self published, print edition). Excerpts from her newest manuscript entitled, “Wing Bones,” can be found in Thrush Poetry Journal, Coldfront This Morning, Stirring, Gargoyle Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, Amethyst Arsenic, and Bop Dead City. Edwards was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, received a writing residency from Drop Forge & Tool, and is Editor-in-Chief of The American Poetry Journal. Her website: http://tsenatoedwards.wix.com/tsenatoedwards.
