Michael Steffen lives in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.  He is a graduate of Empire State College and is currently enrolled in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Vermont College.  He hosts the monthly Riverview Reading Series in Phillipsburg, NJ, providing a venue for emerging and established writers, artists, musicians and vocalists throughout the area.  Poets who have (or will) read at Riverview include Lee Upton, Len Roberts and Gerald Stern.  Michael’s work has been honored in a variety of poetry competitions, including winning the 1997 Rock River Poetry Prize and the 1998 Alsop Review Poetry Competition.  His work has appeared in Licking River Review, Baybury Review, The Old Red Kimono, Mobius, Poetry Motel and Antietam Review; and is forthcoming in Ellipsis, The Ledge and Poetry.
 

Samples of the poet’s work:

 
THE TRUTH, 1961

Grass was alive with creepers balanced on thin spears.
A sea serpent skulked in my green-watered pond,
and hawk-people hid in the woods behind us
hankering for soft flesh, especially
the gooey guts of children.
From the patio, I saw their silhouettes
in the trees, the glint of a tooth
or a white bone cudgel,
as quiet as the gypsies Mrs. Gaul swore,
from her chaise lounge, would steal me,
the python in the garbage
that could grind me to pulp.
Tarantulas prowled the sandbox,
and still, my mother from the kitchen
insisted the fresh air would do me good.
But hiding in my room is no way to live,
so my father carried me in the backyard’s
after-supper gloam to let the ants roam
over his fingers, then mine.  He pointed
to the long-shadowed trees, the unhinged
seaweed in the watery light.  “No monsters,
no cannibals.”  A spider.  Just a spider’s
thin-legged dangle, an eyelash
in the latticed breeze, in the rippling compost,
a garter snake trenching through egg shells.
 
 

 
THE OCTOPUS CAR WASH
 

I’ve sailed off the edge
& landed in a tunnel of tongues,

heavy as hair, a wet maw widening,
narrowing like a kiss,

tender at first, then fierce along the brow,
a chrome edge catching the indifferent light.

Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” on the radio–
the circular brushes spooning, parting

when I get too close–
& the dashboard in my brain glows;

her smile dissolves
into “just friends,” my car door slamming.

Schnapps & tears . . .
Idling in a tunnel of rustling skirts,

I relight her Salem, smoke down
to its maraschinoed filter

& crank the volume, “Baby, come back . . .”
a smooth, channeled ramp–

the polymered buff & shimmy
waxing my dual-carbed LeSabre,

half-lacquered, half-rusted–
dragging me along in neutral.
 

Also:  “Asterisks”

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