HOW DO WE GO FROM HERE TO THERE?

by Michael H. Brownstein

Part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as the 10-02 area, serves as the summer breeding ground for two hundred thousand caribou. Photograph by The Asahi Shimbun via Getty via The New Yorker, December 20, 2017

President Donald Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress, who opened their first year in full control of Washington on rocky terms, are closing it with a flush of late legislative achievements: a sweeping tax overhaul, a long-sought repeal of a pillar of the Affordable Care Act and a surprise deal to open up Arctic drilling—all signed into law Friday. —The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2017

Hold onto these works.
Let the laps come between us,
The field swamps of black blood leaking from metallic arteries.
Is nowhere safe?
Let these secrets divide us.
Snow fell last night.
In the great white house, the small man looks over his great expanse of green.
He does not know what he has sewn.
The wolves are leaving, coyotes join forces:
wild dogs, feral cats, the great grizzly, the large boar of the forest.
My dog is going blind.
I am covered with scabs of disconnection.
In the far north, whales lock behind cages of plastic.
In the west, fire storms and Gomorrah.
In the south the wrong pythons multiply into more pythons.
Is nowhere safe?
Was the cause of this man in the house on the hill to cause disharmony?
Did he think the snow covering the great oil spill pristine and fresh?
Did he think the snow covering the streets of my town clean linen white?
Did he believe the snow falling over the east blister free and safe?
The man looks out his window.
There is no snow where he is,
only a vast discord sinking into morass and danger.
The snow falls acid white chemically deranged from the sky,
and when it lands, muck and mire, gray, black with fresh blood.


Michael H. Brownstein was the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam, 2011.

STEVE KING: THIS IS YOUR NOT SO WONDERFUL LIFE

by Michael H. Brownstein

      King said. "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?"
      Hayes asked: "Than white people?"
      "Than, than Western civilization itself," King said. "It's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That's all of Western civilization."

—USA Today, July 18, 2016

So Congressman Steve King of Iowa woke on Monday morning.
The first thing he did was go to the bathroom—outside in a small wooden shack. (1)
He wiped his behind when he was finished with leaves and other weeds. (2)
Then, like a dog, slapped water onto his face, dug his tongue into the pond and drank. (3)
In the house he put on a smock of leaves (4) after a cold snack of simple food. (5)
He walked to work (6) down crooked pathways to his office in a city without focus (7)
and entered a small office in the capitol of no pattern (7 again) —you get it now—
just about everything was designed or invented by someone who was not white.


1. A typical example is the Indus city of Lothal (c. 2350 BCE). In Lothal all houses had their own private toilet which was connected to a covered sewer network constructed of brickwork held together with a gypsum-based mortar that emptied either into the surrounding water bodies or alternatively into cesspits, the latter of which were regularly emptied and cleaned. (Khan, Saifullah. "Sanitation and wastewater technologies in Harappa/Indus valley civilization 2600-1900 BC")

2. 50 B.C. The Chinese first made paper with short lengths of bamboo and then later added cotton linen rags which were soaked in water and pounded into swollen pulp. This was then formed into sheets and dried.
105 A.D: Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese court official, has his name linked to the invention of paper. Most likely, Ts’ai mixed mulberry bark, hemp, and rags with water, mashed it into pulp, pressed out the liquid, and hung the thin mat to dry in the sun.
8th Century: Arabs were known to make writing paper and were the first to use linen in the process. (The Toilet Paper Encyclopedia)

3. Bamboo tubes sealed at the end with clay provided a usable container in Asia, while the inhabitants of the Tehuacan Valley began carving large stone bowls that were permanently set into a hearth as early as 7,000 BC. (Cookware and Bakeware at Wikipedia)

4. Cotton was used for clothing in Ancient India from 5th millennium BC. Linen cloth was made in Ancient Egypt from the Neolithic period. (History of Clothing)

5. The earliest evidence for fire associated with humans comes from Oldowan hominid sites in the Lake Turkana region of Kenya. The site of Koobi Fora (FxJj20, dated 1.6 million years ago) contained oxidized patches of earth to a depth of several centimeters, which some scholars interpret as evidence for fire control. At 1.4 million years of age, the Australopithecine site of Chesowanja in central Kenya also contained burned clay clasts in small areas. Other Lower Paleolithic sites in Africa that contain possible evidence for fire include Gadeb in Ethiopia (burned rock), and Swartkrans (270 burned bones out of a total of 60,000, dated 600,000-1 million years old), and Wonderwerk Cave (burned ash and bone fragments, ca. 1 million years ago), both in South Africa. (K. Kris Hirst, "The Discovery of Fire")

6. C.R. Patterson, born slave, built automobiles before Henry Ford. (Monette Bailey)

7. President Thomas Jefferson recommended Benjamin Banneker (an African-American) to be a part of a surveying team to lay out Washington, D.C. Appointed to the three-man team by President George Washington, Banneker wound up saving the project when the lead architect quit in a fury – taking all the plans with him. Using his meticulous memory, Banneker was able to recreate the plans. Furthermore Banneker invented a perfectly timed working clock. No wonder Steve King was never on time.


Michael H. Brownstein was the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam, 2011.

TWO POEMS

by Michael H. Brownstein

Image source: Odyssey

ONE MONTH AND WE ARE ALREADY EXHAUSTED

The eighteen wheeler tortoise stepped, jerked, fell back into place:
How can we do this day after day?
The Ozarks grow steeper, brush grass grayer, mice grow bolder inside our walls.
Some days you need to wear a helmet, fatigues.
Others, paper and pen well do, a tablet perhaps, a way to form context. .

Why not words to combat fallacy,
To write on a wall when there is no need for a wall,
Meditations to dissolve conflict?

In the battle of bullies and bullying leadership,
In the battle of superegos.
In the battle of grenade popping automatic weapon thinkers…
The semi reaches the top of the ridge,
Lowers its gears, slowly winds its way down to the hollow.


THE WALL IN QUESTION

A wall built on tumbleweed, spit, grasshopper larvae
Help us, people--help us understand—help us visualize--
I understand none of this. Is there a way I can know?
A wall built of bone marrow mortar and dog piss,
Violent thought and disconnection, the rapid fire
Of bullet cored brick. Help us understand where
This river enters the realm, where this river empties
Its blood to the valleys of snow, how the impact
Of dour men with raccoon hat hair suck away the core.

Michael H. Brownstein has been widely published throughout the small and literary presses. His work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Free Lunch, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, Poetrysuperhighway.com and others. In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including The Shooting Gallery (Samidat Press, 1987), Poems from the Body Bag (Ommation Press, 1988), A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), I Was a Teacher Once (Ten Page Press, 2011), Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Press, 2012), The Possibility of Sky and Hell: From My Suicide Book (White Knuckle Press, 2013) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100 Degrees Outside and Other Poems (Kind of Hurricane Press, 2013). He is the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011).