Small Sovereign

By Michael Goldman

In Small Sovereign, his second full-length collection, poet Michael Favala Goldman draws on experience as a remodeling carpenter, a jazz musician, a Danish translator, a gardener and a parent, to draw us into greater awareness of life’s minute pains and victories from numerous points of view. “We are all sharing atoms, at least/.../like the sea mixes with the sky/words do not keep them apart.” The poems explore the paradox of personal power and powerlessness, using everyday experience as a door to the universal. “The organization has its priorities/which do not include delight.”

Goldman invites the reader to join him in mundane and transformational experiences, such as picking up a hurt elk, walking by a train-car diner, riding an escalator, touring fields of Verona, making soup for a sick friend, gluing a broken table, and choosing flooring. “All that separates you/from your surroundings/is your imagination/of yourself being who you are.”

The poems of Small Sovereign are short, direct, ironic, touching, and get richer with multiple readings. “don’t expect me to stand in the way/I’m small everywhere/except in my little life/where I am a clumsy giant/trying desperately not/to destroy my own city.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Homestead Lighthouse Press
• Release date: Jan 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781950475179

Michael Goldman

Michael Goldman is of Swedish and Indian descent. He was greatly influenced by his Indian grandmother, who introduced him to the beauty of the forest when he was a small boy. Being Swedish also meant being proud of his Viking heritage, which assisted in the development of this story.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Avocados - Stripes Magazine

Kingfisher - Spank the Carp

It’s not the little thing, The Continuing Crisis - Silkworm

The Miracle - Every Day Poems

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With heartfelt appreciation to Linda and Libby.

Avocados

I was walking with my groceries,

an ordinary person doing the most

extraordinary thing. A bag with items

from Mexico, Canada, California, Spain,

and Florida, because how else could I eat

in this white winter. With anonymous saviors

I am bartering my life for food. My legs

are swinging as if it were nothing peculiar,

just moving along the sidewalk.

I can’t distinguish between

my rights, my freedom, and my privilege.

Such a small sovereign, I’m looking

forward to my solitary meal.

Everyone is invited; you are too,

but it’s a secret.

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1

You can’t have one without the other

Everything comes with something else

attached to it.

The shirt has a tag and the tag represents

the workers, chemicals, board members,

vehicles, and acres of land you wear

when you slip it on.

And don’t even get me started

about relationship to another person,

which has more wavelengths

than light and each bar in the spectrum

attachments to tribe, history, memory,

body, always at least one wavelength

like a sad farce –

You’re really going to have to open wide

to take all that in, and do you want to?

Just relating to yourself is a task for the ages.

That thing they say

about being one with everything

is already true, but who can bare it

like a flower

to the daylight?

A high time

My mom and dad wore suede

with fringes

in the New Jersey suburbs.

Long hair and bell bottoms.

At twenty-two,

they had a cheap mortgage and two kids,

an attempt to crush the staidness of their parents

into the tumult of bare feet, assassinations,

their friend returning from Vietnam

with a tracheotomy then dead.

A stab at pressing impetuousness

into childrearing as women march

and the house