Karen McPherson, featured in the Ocean State Review

Gray Matter

In my mind, they lift it from the body
like a slippery baby, plop it
onto a steel tray, weigh &
measure & slice & prep for science and for
that week it is not my father’s
brain, just matter,
later returned to ashes,
wind.

I’m thinking how buried
in the folds of mine are keys to all
the puzzles of genetic replication and a family’s
story. Even as recollection slips
its gears and I’m left to contemplate this
threadless labyrinth, this questless path
of stone and thistle.

I’m singing the circular riddle
of consciousness: what is
bigger than it can ever be
small enough
to hold?

Karen McPherson on “Gray Matter“:

There’s something so compelling and curious and impossible—trying to get inside one’s own mind, to think around and about one’s own thinking. We donated my father’s body to science. I’m pondering the connection between brain and mind. Between matter and mattering. I’m trying to think my way through and past the loss. I keep singing in the threadless labyrinth.

Karen McPherson is a post-academic, elderqueer poet and literary translator from Oregon. Her poetry publications include Skein of Light (Airlie Press, 2014) and the chapbooks Sketching Elise (Finishing Line, 2012) and Long for This World (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024). Her published translations include Up Close (Ekstasis Editions, 2023), a poetry collection by Québec poet Louise Dupré. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, Chicago Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and The Women’s Review of Books. She is a former editor in the Airlie Press poetry collective.