All Over the Place: Let the Earth Speak in Tongues and If You Listen Hard Enough, You Will Understand

By Michael H. Brownstein

The voices in the graveyard have been known to scream

and if you settle where the crab grass grows,

you can hear them skipping over locust burns and dandelion bones.

Water, too, needs a sorting place away from confusion

but the voices flow into it, the voices flow with it

even as we death bomb and death bomb

bone, powder, flesh, fog, burning hair —

stone and scorpion, marker and–

our edge of the Ethiopian desert, the grand vulture waiting,

and further south, the grander elephants stepping off track

to caress the bones of a fallen sister poached for its armor.

In 2001 we rat bombed islands near Panama and killed the deer

and later people bombed villages in Afghanistan

with enough poison to cover their dead.

Copyright © 2021 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.