All Over the Place: “Home” from The...Other Poems

By Michael H. Brownstein

Home

Potholed with devil sores.
He learned to tolerate them,
And now this: straight aways

Huge with speed bumps like blemishes.

“Everything is big there,”
They told him. “Be careful.”
And America was big. Big streets.
Big cereal boxes. Big windows.

“So what does your country export?”
Someone at the university asked.
“People,” he answered.
“People? Just people?”
“People, yes, and sometimes ash.”
He strained his neck
Staring at the tall buildings
Larger than fig trees
On the north of his island.
He found calling home
Too expensive, began to write
Almost everyday, and sent emails
Once he found that email
Could be received.
One day he decided to go
Into the farming Midwest
To watch the vegetables grow.
He missed sour sop and paw paw,
St. Lucia mango and kinips,
But he loved fresh cobbed corn
And tomatoes from the vine.
He wondered if he could take home
Strawberries and huckleberries,
Watermelon as big as iguanas,
The colors of pear.
Still he wrote and all was fine
Though the highways were too quick,
The paved roads too fast,
Their shoulders stone and asphalt,
And he thought of goat
And wild pig, and their shoulders,
And a stew called goat water
He could never cook,
But his mother could
Slow and simple
Boiled in water,
Her old pot burnt and dented.
He kept inside himself
The sweet taste of water
At the burn and longed for it.
When school ended, he packed,
Purchased a ticket from Caribbean Sun,
Changed his mind, and became an export,
Moved into a recess of the city
And lived, working for cash and food,
With three other men
Not from home
But close enough
To become friends.
The volcano stopped erupting.
The island began its rebirth
And they wrote to him of success.
He wrote back, but did not return.
There was something
About big and speed
Anyway. So he stayed home.

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.