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Michael Todd Steffen is the author of two books of poetry, most recently On Earth As It Is (Cervena Barva Press, 2022). He is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in journals including The Boston Globe, Constellations, Synchronized Chaos, The Lyric, The Dark Horse, and The Poetry Porch.

Michael Todd Steffen

Homelessness

An embarrassment of panda bears wears
black lachrymose eye patches of worry
and weariness on their masked mugs—
little facing up at first
in denial the first phase of grief
over the loss of their home
in the Minshan and Qinling mountain forests.

A troubling of goldfish swishes
to a frenzied thrashing on the small mirror
of the surface of the murky
fishbowl they have made of their world
in anger the second phase of grief
over their inability ever to possess
an idea of home. So as homelessness sets in

a bloat of hippopotamuses muses
vaguely in the waking sky over the river

where a raft of otters ought to
but they don’t—
webbed in their reaches
to swim, these virtual players
curious with a stone held like a cell phone
in a laid-back pose
of bargaining—the fourth step of grief.

The bloat of hippos goes on posing.

A flamboyance of flamingos in a key marsh?
A mischief of mice in the walls?

I never thought of this
grumbles one final flicker
from an aurora of polar bears
adrift on a receding ice floe
into a noble streak across the sky with its echo—
I just never thought of this as anything else
but my home.

 — Michael Todd Steffen

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