Cold
I wake senile this morning
enable to remember if my wife’s name
belongs to a woman or a man.
Outside, flesh shivers and I
flicker in and out inside surrounded
by a flurry of dogs awake and asleep,
growling and mute. You cannot brake
a breath-thought or destroy
an oxygen-dysfunction.
The dogs burrow themselves
under blankets and I try to recall
something I knew yesterday,
the day before yesterday,
a yesterday a week ago,
but not now, not in this stretching moment,
this thin brain-pause,
this advocate of a life-inadequacy.
Michael H. Brownstein has nine poetry chapbooks including A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), 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).
THE BIG WINDOWS REVIEW 