Why he went to the shelter finally by Michael H. Brownstein

She pokes holes into the body’s work of a person

until the body’s work of the person is poked through—

 

deflation, deflationary, deflationist,

gut-shot punctuation, fiber blast evacuation—

 

vocabulary hard wood and hard stone

obsidian and Modoc lava, soft bone of the wing of wren

 

noise blasting ejaculation, terrorist rendering distillation,

detest, detestation, detestionist

 

and the body bleeds a vocabulary of smoke without fire,

meanings within cruelty without touch,.

 

He walked away from the noise more than once,

and then found he did not have to always reenter the room.

—

Michael H. Brownstein 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, and others. In addition, he has nine poetry chapbooks including  A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), What Stone Is (Fractal Edge Press, 2005), Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Press, 2012), and The Possibility of Sky and Hell: From My Suicide Book (White Knuckle Press, 2013).