
Jenny Penland
Late Night Dopamine ‣ This is your brain on love.

Swore she'd only daydream
on morning walks
Now her strolls around the park
canvas the city blocks
Traded tangled sheets in
for five a.m.
Needed to shed her soul
so she’s running again
Tried self-help, therapy, medication
Yoga, kava, crystals, meditation
The doctors all say she's getting too thin
But her mind's as heavy as it's ever been
Cause each turn, her roads merge
down Memory Lane,
Took the express way last night,
and detoured her pain
hopped on a fast lane
bypassing neurocircuitry
Saved his number in her phone
as "Dopamine”
Perhaps a mind's only fine
when it pretends
Must be why it always
begins again
But she wants to want to want it to end
So she spends her days
reading books
And her nights
writing them
Still, all her prose just echos:
what's done can't be undone
In throes, solatium
She knows it‘ll never come
Cause he's just too stubborn to succumb
Could never make the right choice
Until he tried all the wrong ones