PSH: Poets of the Week

Bio (auto)

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. He has been featured in a number of on-line journals including chicagopoetry.com, Milk, Muse Apprentice Guild and poetrysuperhighway.com. In addition he has won a number of awards including the Ommation Press Best Chapbook Award and Triton College‚s International Poetry Prize. He published The Paper Bag and WYMBS Broadside, wrote for the Chicago Reader and other area newspapers and has an educational column in the SouthStreet Journal and is the elementary school teacher editor for Substance. Brownstein 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). Presently he performs original one-man performance pieces throughout the Chicago area. Two of these are Ten Times People Attempted to Rob Me and Let's Eat Grasshoppers Cause Everything Else Tastes Like Chicken.

Age Old Questions and All of the Time in the City

I am past fifty and wondering where I am going with this.
Hanukah has ended, Christmas is past, Kwanza is gathering mass.
A hundred feet from the trail, the horse barn has the smell of horses,
Sweat and sawdust stained and sticky, mold drenched in snow.
A son cannot understand the reflections of a father,
A daughter asks if God wears clothes all of the time,
And a sister says she knew an angel once: She never wore anything.
Early morning, the resident blue jay hops on its branch:
Glory. Glory. Glory. A wife has an inability to see,
A son combs his hair without a mirror, a daughter dresses in the dark,
and a sister says: I met God once. She is always naked before the mirror.

The Caterpillar Wars

We climb the trail of hard tack and belligerence,
one foothold at a time, one handhold at a time,
our bodies pressed against rock and limb,
the ridge a door opens to palisades
rich with water and droppings, carnivores and calcite,
a knife reserved for some of us.
We are on our way to the caterpillar wars,
night long with sleep, day too hot for breathing.
The rock climber knows the inside of rock,
the footpath earth, the broken rowboat
its gravel grave, all of the grass the grass beside it.
Please. Take this staff.
Things are less angry here,
less full of quantity, of a tenor in voice.
Soon we will be between thick fences,
then forests, then where the horse hunters live
and everything is not always good.
Here is the town of unequal opportunity
and the river running through it little more than sink water
overrunning its basin drop by drop.
You know, everything in the world begins
as a puddle and then turns to mud.

Bio (auto)

Deidre Elizabeth is a 40 yr. old single vegan leftist liberal living in Takoma Park, Md but is from the Harrisburg, Pa region origionally. She has served as poetry editor for Verse Libre Quarterly and Erosha. Also she's published in print with the following books: Velvet Avalanche, Washing the Color of Water Golden, Women of the Web, Megaera Volume I, and This So Called Life. She published various places on line as well. She is a Seventh Day Adventist and volunteers with various ministries at her church.

Visit Deidre on the web here: www.ms-deidre.net

The following work is Copyright © 2007, and owned by Deidre Elizabeth and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

when blue eyes turn green

i wonder about the emotional weight of the leaves as they decay
the brilliance of yellow, vibrance of red
i mean chlorophyll decays at a consistent rate
and the wind isn't capable of blowing just one leaf
surely there is more than just the randomness of a fall from the tree to consider
even the daily humidity or ambient temperature isn't enough of a consideration
forget about barometric pressure

My God
this mist, that haze, your fog
and all the mottled sky

III

listen,

the trembling branches