All Over the Place: The Shunning of Stanley McTick

By Michael H. Brownstein

Sometimes a wind is but a breeze and all of the birds twitter fretfully across branches, fish swim to the surface and study the weight of their skin, and dogs circle tightly in place before they stretch their long noses as far as they can stretch, their faithful tongues loose and hungry.

It was that kind of afternoon when Stanley McTick appeared on our block. He wasn’t too much to look at, but he was wearing hundred-fifty dollar gym shoes and two-hundred dollar pants and a designer T-shirt that just had to be priceless. All of the girls gasped and all of us boys wondered if we could beat him one on one on the basketball court. He walked a third of the way down the block before he rested on Old Man Miller’s cement stoop, removed a leather satchel from his shoulder, pulled out a poetry chapbook, and began reciting poetry deep resonant exciting. We found ourselves having to gather around.

I know you know what a “shunning” is. All of us have been shunned at one time or another. It’s fairly simple actually, but no matter how bad it gets, no matter how infuriating and irritating, you know you will come upon someone who will not shun you. They see you coming and are glad you are there.

That is how we knew Stanley McTick was not one of us, but could become one of us. When he read the poems from that chapbook, he sucked in every bit of the only breeze left, and we knew he knew pain and we knew he knew ugliness and we knew he knew terror. We knew he could become our friend.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.