All Over the Place:How the First Ink Came to Be

By Michael H. Brownstein

Pillars of Creation—the nebula of dust and gas towers—

tattoos of star and cloud—claw ripped across an atmosphere—

ink blue and brown, red and gold, skin deep and deeper—

and this is where we get the rock to make our fancy colors,

the Tattoo Artist of the Palisades tells the tourists

in the innermost sanctum of the Tattoo Garden of Cappella.

Do you not see the streaks of birth? The stretch marks of my love?

Look at the detail. Notice how colors blend, how life begins,

how this place too may have one time been a grand nebula.

Then a small glitter of white-blue fire rushes near him.

He reaches out, easily catches it and gently tosses it

toward a gray boulder sagging in the palisade. Watch, he says,

and we do. The white-blue flame turns into a white-blue bird

meshing itself forever into the rock—We’ll call it Star Bird,

he says, and then he turns and walks through a doorway.

What! Don’t be astonished! There is nothing here but light,

cosmic dust and cosmic glow, everything here a star-child.

Into the cave we walk, the passage deep and well lit,

spindles of star dust, a litter of fiery coloring, remnant

of ancient times, new horizons—Pillars of Creation—

a core and an inner core—convection currents—a battery of suns.

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.