Psychology 402: Brain and Behavior

When I discover I have to dissect a sheep’s brain,
I go down the hall to Animal Behavior and plead my case,
but it’s too late. I’ll have to pry my way through
the four ventricles, push pins into gray matter and breathe
formaldehyde through a useless white mask.

I hold the brain in my awful hands, make an incision at the base
of the cerebellum, place a red pin into the pineal gland,
a green pin into the amygdala: here’s where it feels joy,
here’s where it feels fear, here’s where it remembers
the beautiful dying stars.