All Over the Place: For My Sister, Lori

By Michael H. Brownstein

—Today is her memorial service.
She will be missed.


She was beautiful
even when she was not—
brilliant
even when she pretended not to be—
a huge window of passion
even as passion was downsized—
and, yes, she was beautiful
even when she was not.

I’m standing in some kind of church
praying to a foreign god:
Please make everything right.
Please make everything good.
The surgery to remove her brain tumor
successful.
I was maybe five.

Hey, I said, you have to listen to this
and I played Vanilla Fudge.
She clapped, asked for more,
and we chugalugged to the Supremes at the Copa.
I was maybe twelve.

I can handle this one, she commanded,
and I’m sure everything will be solved.
We were working in Uptown, Chicago,
a great sprawling slum violent and neglected.
She took the child under her wing
and he thrived because her wings were that strong.
I was maybe nineteen and she
one year younger.

Of course, you can come, and she laughed.
My home is always your home.
The pipes in my old house had burst again
and she warmed me with tacos,
handed me a warm towel,
asked what else I might need to be comfortable.
I was maybe in my thirties.

At the art fair,
she knew everyone.
Introduced me to one artist after another,
gave me a front row seat under her canopy.
What do you think? she asked
and without words she knew my response.
I was maybe forty-five.

Then one day she took a swim in the river
a Mercedes Benz
and climbed the banks a rusted Ford.
Suddenly
everything was underwater.
She asked me why this happened to her.
How do you answer that kind of question?

She died at 8:22 PM,
January 16th, 2022
complication from a stroke.
The night before she passed,
she spent the early evening
singing old time songs with her husband,
and even though her stroke
hit her five years earlier
and she could hardly see
or move parts of her body,
she danced.
Oh, yes, she danced.

Copyright © 2022 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.