Issue 45.1
Winter 2015

Katie Willingham

1.
BBC News, March 5th:

Scientists publish the most detailed brain scans
ever taken. Images of the first
sixty-eight subjects take up about two
terabytes of computer memory, enough to fill
over four hundred DVDs.

2.
To make a darkroom, you must
paper the windows, to keep out the light.

3.

There are many pictures of me
with the family dog but I only
remember the smell
of his breath like a fish market
laced with smoke.

4.
A postcard:

woodcut by Bryan Nash Gill
from the exhibit at the Botanic
Garden—tree rings, the lines
gone blurry in the bottom right.

5.
A labor of love, my mother
would say as she squinted down
at the prints in the water.

6.
A photograph described
as overexposed shows a loss of detail such
that bright parts of an image become washed or
blown out.

Large-scale relief prints of the cross-sections
of trees, says the postcard, this one
Honey Locust. I like the speciation, as in
an anatomy textbook. On Gill’s website,
each detailed image is glassy in the liquid
crystal display.

8.
Mother, source material:

She stands at the window, licking
an envelope, sealing it shut.

9.
The brain scans show a functional or
structural map of circuitry. It’s hard not
to compare—hers like a walnut,
the meat of it gone bitter.

10.
Darwin:

What checks the natural tendency
of each species is most obscure.

11.
What does it mean to make art
anyone can make? Transfer
is the art term for wood-cuts.

12.
The ones she hung on the wall never
had any people. It’s different,
she said, they’re posed.

13.
Darwin:

Probably in no single instance should we know
what to do, so as to succeed.

…

• Want more? Order issue 45.1 to read “Honey Locust” in its entirety
• Or read more excerpts from this issue.

Katie Willingham is a Zell postgraduate fellow in poetry at the University of Michigan where she was the recipient of a Hopwood Prize and a Nicholas Delbanco Thesis Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Paper Darts, Phantom Limb, and others.