All Over the Place: How It Came to Be This Way

By Michael H. Brownstein

[There were days I would get off the elevated green line train at 43^rd and violence permeated all of my senses. It would be so great, its stench would actually burn my nose. I had to cross a large empty lot—well, I didn’t have to (I could have stayed to the main streets and sidewalks)—next to Mr. Stubb’s building, the son of a sharecropper who came to Chicago in the fifties. I didn’t know this, but his wife always watched me cross the lot just in case.
    Then I’d come to the park of broken glass and other litter—but the drinking fountain always worked. Beyond that, one more empty lot. Later on I found out the mother of one of my students watched me cross through that part every day just in case. After that, I was at King Drive and then my school.
    When the smell of violence was in the air, I prepared myself for a rough day. Otherwise, things were much easier for the most part.
    This poem tries to describe the stench that would overcome me and send me to my classroom and other duties with a sense of foreboding of something that, fortunately, did not always happen.]


Desolate
a growing fire begins in your nose

and somewhere at the back of your neck,

an intangible.

Desolate
a great fear rising at the hairline,

the useless limbs at the end of the shoulder,

time a patient fool...

                                —written crossing the great empty lot
                                  near the 43^rd Street Station, Green Line
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From my 2011 collection, I Was a Teacher Once & Other Philosophies, published by Ten Pages Press

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.