Dennis J Bernstein
Grace Notes For The North Star
I keep dreaming about Paul. He played sax and made puppets
while the baseball game blasted out of his 16 inch RCA black and white
portable with the adjustable indoor "Rabbit Ears" for enhanced reception.
Paul's puppets sang the blues. They danced on tables. His puppets were
Angels. Some even had wings. The seasoned blues man he sculpted before
cancer took the tools right out of paul's hands,sang for us after the puppet
maker "tuned up" the strings on the old man's guitar. Today as I woke I heard
Paul's blues man bouncing grace-notes off the north star.
Bio
Dennis J Bernstein is an award-winning poet. His previous volume, Five Oceans in a Teaspoon, won the 2020 IPPY Gold Medal Award for Poetry and the 2020 Best Book Award for Poetry by the American Bookfest, and was a finalist in 2020 Best Book Award, Poetry International Book Awards. Bernstein's previous collection, Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom, won the 2012 Artists Embassy International Literary Cultural Award. His poetry has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Bat City Review, Texas Observer, ZYZZYVA, and numerous other journals. Bernstein's artists' books/plays French Fries and GRRRHHHH: a study of social patterns, co-authored with Warren Lehrer, are considered seminal works in the genre, and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Georges Pompidou Centre, and other museums around the world.