A Visit To The Zoo
I nurture the wrong people,
gangrene girls with color scars,
small breasts like the yellow cusps of dandelion.
I have broken so many fights
the count is beyond fingers,
beyond toes.
We walk the stone paths of the zookery.
Ivy, oat, barley. Great frogs, green shade,
wood ducks, a rock ledge.
water lilies like thick fish, spotted fish,
striped fish turning delicate hoops.
We eat lunch on stone benches jutting out over water,
a breeze ghosting through spiked grass.
Swifts move through the air like Chinese fighting kites
and there by the fallen tree, an egret,
wings stronger than hunger,
wings stronger than selfishness.
My girls do not see the wood duck, the swift.
They do not see the fish, the large frog.
My girls complain about the walking,
this was a trip to the zoo,
we came to see animals
not Lake Michigan,
not the break wall,
not a rumble of rock blocking waves,
the water green gray blue,
not shells, not algae,
not sand thick with alewives.
I nurture caged girls,
meat-eating girls,
and when the rock dove lands by thrown bread,
I nurture girls who glory in the herring gull’s attack,
a rock dove retreating quickly,
wild wings sparking like fields of lasers.
THIS WAS ONCE A LOVE POEM
Go on; enjoy yourself. I’m not returning home
this winter. I don’t want to make the mistake
of another year, Missouri a long way off,
full of superstition, omens, and witch’s meat.
I’ll miss the ripeness of soil, the grazing river,
wild turkeys, possums in the abandoned car,
the red fox living beneath the house, voles
camped in the hills. Some things need endings
more than others, superstition a heavy master.
Splitting poles, spitting on the broom,
pockets hanging inside out near running water,
Sankofa birds, a sneeze without a bless you,
how the new year begins at midnight.
A TEAR IN A SCREEN AND IT’S PARTLY CLOUDY OUTSIDE
A tear in the screen one inch in diameter,
the lodging place for the morning sky to begin,
and I wish when the woman with the strong back
stopped me before the dark house
to ask if she could massage my feet for bus fare
I wish I had said, yes, and let her dark hands cover my feet
instead of the thing I did which was give her exact change
and watch her fade into the lamplight on her way to the bus stop.
It’s not darkness through the screen,
just the start of blue light.
Someone once offered to kiss me for a dollar
and I turned her down
even though I knew the exact worth of that one kiss,
how expensive it would really be.
The tear in the screen does not grow with age.
It is there because this is where it is supposed to be.
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, After Hours, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review and others. In addition, he has eight poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004) and What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005).Brownstein taught elementary school in Chicago’s inner city (he is now retired), but he continues to study authentic African instruments with his students, conducts grant-writing workshops for educators and the State of Illinois Title 1 Convention, and records performance and music pieces with grants from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the Oppenheimer Foundation, BP Leadership Grants, and others.
