My mother did not make the trek across earth mountains and rocky beaches.
She allowed us to sail into ourselves one accident at a time.
Nowhere does the graffiti list off every Siberian possibility.
My mother was sweet oil and hard tack, always in full color.
Years go by and time stops.
We knew better and we did not know better.
My mother drove a car into a deer on a country road.
We settled into a denial of one anthropology over another.
A flowering tree has an incredible need to flower.
My mother dreamt us up one brick at a time.
— [Mendeleev’s] mother must have recognized his
precocious intelligence, and when he reached fourteen, feeling that he would be lost without a proper education, she walked thousands of miles from Siberia with him—first to the University of Moscow (from which, as a Siberian, he was barred) and then to St. Petersburg, where he got a grant to train as a teacher. (She herself, apparently, nearing sixty at the time, died of exhaustion…)
Oliver Sachs, Uncle Tungsten
THE END
Here is an individual who writes because he has to
He seeks no audience no acclaim no book deal
He understands the world is coming to its end
What he writes will no longer matter to anyone
But himself, a friend or two, perhaps a lover.
When the world draws itself into an extinction,
He knows what will be left, what will be new,
A people of the forest with a curiosity of a forest,
Not technology or assembly lines or running water,
But a simplicity of designs in trees, a design in bark,
The song the crow sings as she devours the newly dead.
A MOMENTARY PEACE
She talks of god, she talks to god.
Sometimes she hears an answer.
In the waking silence, she is stubborn.
Early spring, the paper wasp,
Chewed bark, a honey bee,
The wind cruel and heavy,
One hesitation and a pond.
She sings a trumpet to the first cricket,
Everything whitewashed rain and light,
Her notebook open on her lap,
Her pencil sticky with dew.
Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published throughout the small and literary presses. His work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, Poetrysuperhighway.com and others. In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011), Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Press, 2012), The Possibility of Sky and Hell: From My Suicide Book (White Knuckle Press, 2013) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100 Degrees Outside and Other Poems (Kind of Hurricane Press, 2013). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011)