Julia Bouwsma

Study in Epigenetic Memory III

I turn to photographs to help me recall—my mind wafting
fifteen years back to summon the cherry blossoms

in Fairmount Park, the Sundays we gathered
with picnic blankets and beer beneath a serenity

of pink falling as afternoon sunlight cascaded its floral
veil. Sense of smell is the sense most closely linked

to memory. The chemical equivalent of cherry blossom scent
is acetophenone. In the experiment, researchers spray it

at the male mice as they administer electric shocks
to their feet. The goal: to trace how trauma molds our DNA.

The flowering cherry may have an upright or weeping habit.
Once the mice know the pink scent of tumbling blooms only as pain,

they are bred. Most of the flowering cherries you can buy in stores
are abominations, weeping higan limbs top-grafted

to a straight cherry trunk. The mouse pups of the electrocuted
are raised by mice who never learned the honeyed deceit

of cherry blossoms, but still when the smell is released
to the air, they show alarm, grow jumpy and nervous.

In second and third generations, this fear fades to sensitivity
but lingers on. An ornamental cherry lives no more

than forty years. When the researchers dissect the mice they discover,
in the small buds of their brains, a greater number of neurons

able to detect the cherry scent. But still the researchers know little—
just the small cruelties of fact, how sweetly they helix and drift

through our contorted branches, our outstretched
fingertips, as memory drops its petals all around us.

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Julia Bouwsma lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, farmer, freelance editor, critic and small-town librarian. She is the author of two poetry collections: Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She is the recipient of the 2018 Maine Literary Award; the 2016-17 Poets Out Loud Prize, selected by Afaa Michael Weaver; and the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award, selected by Linda Pastan. Her poems and book reviews can be found in Grist, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, River Styx and other journals. A former Managing Editor for Alice James Books, Bouwsma currently serves as Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact and as Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine.