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  1. University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
  2. Medicine and Meaning
  3. Our Encephalon Wrongs Us

Our Encephalon Wrongs Us

Matthew Zambito

Panic is accelerating as if in freefall,
a tumor on your thoughts, lesions
on your feelings. Melancholia turns

dysthymia (if you’re lottery lucky) or into
a treatment-resistant depression deep
as the Mariana Trench if the Mariana Trench

got used as a drainage ditch. Tics convulse
muscles by a nervy, bedeviled compulsion.
The holed shebang remains a mystery

of the mind with no whodunit revelation
come the last chapter. Psych-prescribed
pills popped provide effective effects plus

plenty of others on the side. Your cerebral
hemispheres keep having a hateful lovers’
quarrel over corpus callosum and require

couples counseling you can’t afford. Ideas
for brainchildren, already straightjacketed
in a room padded with corpses, sob in-

consolably. If you’re gabbing with ghosts
you’re all the way there. You’re there,
and not, and a god, golden and bovine.

Bio

Matt Zambito is the author of The Fantastic Congress of Oddities, and two chapbooks, Guy Talk and Checks & Balances. New poems appear or are forthcoming in Freshwater Literary Journal, Braided

Posted by Chadley Uekman on April 9, 2026

Filed Under: 13-poetry

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