What Fires in the Brainpan
by Zebulon Huset

      
    			“Poverty causes crime and crime causes poverty.”
    						-Larry Krasner
    
    Far deadlier than nightshade,
    masked by dusk's shadows
    
    need waits, one in the chamber
    for the concealed carriers.
    
    He didn't want to create
    brain matter confetti,
    
    but the matter in his brain
    fired its neurons to this end.
    
    It wasn't want that led him here
    so much as happenstance.
    
    Not desire or whimsy so much 
    as perpetual pawn-status.
    
    As waking to discover the
    whole world was still uphill.
    
    
    
    
Packingtown Review – Vol. 25, Spring 2026

Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and others. He edits the prompt-based Sparked Literary Magazine.

  1. Wendy Vardaman
    railroad tragedypoetry