All Over the Place: “Eight Breaks in the Glaze....” from The..Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

Eight Breaks in the 

Glaze or If We Ate
Superstition for Supper

1.

I see exact replication in everyone, every tree,

      every landscape, every valley,
      in every thick mountain crag.

Birds know how to hate that way too.

2.

Yet this is the time for slow rivers, snow rivers, rivers of stone,

3.

a feeling crazy and shark flint eyes,

brussel sprout hair and the boomerang effect,

the suicide woman and her bomber friend,

the political ogre and the half-moon tree.

4.

The grey-eyed lobbyist does walk the eighteen steps to the window,

5.

but you can never tell what will happen next

inside the door locked tight with boxes.

6.

What? I should give you money?
I should shine your shoes?
I should turn topsy-turvy?
I should rhyme your words?

7.

Simon didn’t just jump over the electric candle.

He flew into the air like a tambourine

and broke through the wall like a pile of bricks.

8.

If I don’t know you and we split a pole,

does that lessen who we are?

Copyright © 2013, 2023 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.