Michael H. Brownstein - Two Poems

Night, South Dakota, No Fresh Water for Forty Miles

 

There is an ease in the way meteors breeze into flame
like the sudden change in leaf one night, late autumn
when their lives bleed into yellows, bright reds,
sometimes the frail lint of nightfall,
stars tickling the sky, sunlight
hiding everything alive in the dark.

 

 

 

Jack Frost Sleeps with Goldilocks

 

Cold sleeps in the room with Beauty

rearranging itself into frost giants and lumberjacks.

Snow White is still in development,

and Loki—well, he’s already a myth.

This I know: Beauty sleeps under twenty blankets

and always feels the pinch of the pea—grows her hair

long enough to cut, and cuts it—carries fresh meat pies

through the forest to lure wolves to their death,

to skin them—and when she falls asleep in her brass bed,

the cold remains, unremitting, a poisoned apple,

a hundred year sleep, a broken glass slipper 

Humpty Dumptied into so many pieces

no prince in love wants to glue it back together again.

 

 

 

Michael H. Brownstein wrote Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (http://booksonblog35.blogspot.com/) and one night while camping in Kentucky, had a rattlesnake snuggle up to him inside his sleeping bag. Apparently he survived that mishap as well as the one with the sniper who could not hit him as he crossed a field along 44th Street in Chicago.