HOWIE GOOD

 

 

To the Woman with an Undiagnosed Medical Condition Who Ran over People with Her Car

You want to forget why you came. It’s about sun and about how close our ancestors lived to the Equator. Everything crackles from fire. Meandering through, you don't see anybody, you just see how a tree moves, what the shade is like under it, only a few colors. Don’t believe the smugglers when they say this is such a wonderful thing. There are bodies down there, and we can’t get to them, because it’s actually like a prison, and we are the criminals.





















Absent Music

We knew it was dangerous, but people wouldn’t listen to us. I often see them in dreams now. A black heap of them. Birds have pecked their faces, their hands. It’s better not to look at the faces. The sky throbs, the ground throbs. Even the trees are crippled. Horses, the clayey colors of earth, have fallen down dead. Wind stirs their manes.

&

Doctors in white coats attached electrodes to our heads and told us to sleep, but I couldn’t go back, I just couldn’t. I went to the funerals. I went to the homes where they were sitting shiva. I went to the vigils. The crunching noise, I guess, was teeth scraping against my skull.

&

We were getting older, and it was hard work. People had stopped leaving their homes. Many were just skeletons. Floors overflowed with injured and blood. I couldn’t come up with an innocent explanation for this. Although still early, shopkeepers were pulling down the shutters of their shops. I stood there, trying to see in, while birds kept falling, falling in pairs and falling in groups, to the ground.

&

The partisan had been dragged from a basement cell to his execution. He stood facing the submachine gun, but his gaze, fearful, deep, jagged, was turned inward, and at the last moment, there was the anxious and sweet smell of Christmas trees on fire. I felt sorry for everyone. For men, for roosters, for dogs. And when I laughed, it was like crying.









 

 


Gin for Breakfast

On the beach was an older guy with a young woman. She sort of leaned on him, like she had passed out. He was doing some strange hand movements. “This doesn’t look like a memory,” I thought. I’ve slept under bridges, on park benches, out in the woods. I’ve been hit with hammers. I’ve been stabbed in the back over $55. And yet I had no inkling about who the man was or what this was about. Even now, thousands of gin bottles thrown from German ships into the world's oceans during the last century still haven’t reached shore.





















The Seventh Day

What story should we tell? We have already told the story about the woman found on the street holding her own eyeball. There’s a Starbucks near there, and if you go early, it’s not very busy, but worn out because of war, and the wind and sea, too. “Please help, please help, please help,” the woman just kept saying. “Please hurry up.” But, first, God rested, and then there were soldiers and cries of agony and total darkness at one in the afternoon.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of The Loser’s Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize for Poetry from Thoughtcrime Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.