Horn of Plenty      By Caitlin Cardina

There is great talk of a feast beneath the scalp:
The yolk of the head, size of a large grapefruit,
with the lobed symmetry of a walnut,

so often acknowledged as a crowning custard,
a bowl of curds, or finely molded aspic.
The cortex, they say, is like the rind

of an orange, and a rice-grain morsel of it
holds ten thousand sugar-sipping neurons.
They tell of the almandine amygdala,

the egg of the thalamus, the cerebellum
nestled in like a clenched tomato,
and the legendary, pea-sized hypothalamus.

Plenty to satisfy any hunger, it would seem.
Bur reach further into the cornucopia
and withdraw what no one has

plucked and weighed on a grocer's scale:
dreamfruit, idea sauce, the ambrosia of memory.