MAKE LOVE LIKE WAR

No need to look it up online. I already know why light bruises so easily. You and even I, a man with spirochetes floating inside, pass through time no problem. Although don’t expect too much. It’s like the full body scan at the airport except I’m lying on my back and floating up (but oh how slowly), up toward the frayed light, and there’s no far anymore and no near,  there’s no me and no you, there’s only flash, bang, boom, and this feeling of floating where the dark can’t.


About Howie Good:
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Dark Specks in a Blue Sky from Another New Calligraphy.

LOVE IS THE BOMB

Sometimes
grinning openly
like the face
of Jesus
people see
in a slice
of cheese toast

other times
wrung out
& staggering
toward you
with that sort
of concave,
radioactive look,

the night
of a thousand suns
shimmering,

bodacious orange
on black,

& grabbing you
like Khrushchev’s shoe
by the hand.

About Howie Good:
Howie Good's latest book of poetry is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014) from MadHat Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely, who does most of the real work.

FAMOUS FOOTWEAR

Seven people dead, the news said.
I study the coolly swaying hips
of the woman walking in front of me.
This is all the music there is.
Or maybe this music is all there is.
See the difference? A lone baby shoe
at the entrance to a dark alley.



About Howie Good:
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the new poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a crisis center, which you can read about here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red. He is also the author of numerous chapbooks, including most recently The Devil’s Fuzzy Slippers from Flutter Press and Personal Myths from Writing Knights Press. He has another chapbook, Fog Area, forthcoming from Dog on a Chain Press.

TWO PIECES BY HOWIE GOOD

THE BEREAVED

That son of a bitch,
my heart, waving and shouting

what sounds like hi! Hi!
when there’s nobody there

but clocks and mirrors
smashed in the street.


MY LIFE & HARD TIMES        

1

He comes toward me,
jingling a paper cup.

The kind of books I write
aren't the kind that sell.

2

I stand knee-deep
in the noise of spiders.
Old cuts begin to bleed.

If they won’t love me,
an angel is thinking,
they can still fear me.

3

An ungovernable city of chill and gloom.
Every street ends in an ellipsis. . .

Only a stranger, or madman, would stop here.
I step down off the bus.



About Howie Good:
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the 2011 poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a charity, which you can read about here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red

IN EXTREMIS

1

I’m dressed in a French-cut suit the color of a cloudy day. A cadaver dog approaches, hesitant and mannerly. There’s no effective pill. There never was.

2

Knives and hammers merge into one vast night. Hardly anyone else is listening.  I pass the sixth day translating another misery into lights and voices. Meanwhile, the tired waitress steps down off the bus and shivers. The gods respond to questions only in the summer when all the windows are open.

3

Somewhere there’s a picture of me with a different face. Why bother to force a giraffe into a flower pot? I seem to be thinking. Great sages never phoned, and even if they had, their language would’ve been gray and obscure. My cuts bled. The hole in my favorite T-shirt also refused to heal. Only one thing left to do, the fat lady said – sing.

4

Higher and higher, past thickets, boulders, grievous ravines, floats a horse, broken and crumbly, gnawing its side. I stand knee-deep in blue grass. There’s a haze between me and the rest of the world. In the sudden start, somebody lost his hat. Nobody stops to pick it up. Tonight we’ll water our horses in the Tennessee River. The stars will be hard to see.

About Howie Good:

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing.

THE OLDEST ESTABLISHED PERMANENT FLOATING CRAP GAME

1
Birds had been falling from the sky all day. I leaned out the window. The street churned with lights and sirens. Pickpockets worked the crowd. Something bundled like a baby lay under a rose bush. I didn’t see it, as I was distracted by a pair of dancing feet.

2
Everything’s lost! the messenger cried. Chairs and wine glasses, humble cherished objects, flew in great circles over our heads. We let words chose their own meanings. Awake in her little bed, the young daughter of friends listened to a querulous piece of chalk scratching all night on the blackboard.

3
The streets were decked out with flags and banners for some unspecified celebration. She smiled when I told her. Only I would have noticed the poignant tilt of her head. The sky was an empty gray glove. Winos whispered directions. Holding hands, we stopped to watch a road crew reaffix the fallen leaves to branches.

4
To get red, you need dust and haze. Pollution makes the sky so beautiful. Sparks showered down on us.

5
Only collaborators had permission to stay. It was the anniversary of the disappearance of wild birds. A government clerk sat in a café eating a macaroon. He would lower his eyes when a woman or transport passed. One war was always ending, another always beginning.


About Howie Good:
Howie Good's latest chapbook is Threatening Weather from Whale Sounds, available as a free download at http://wschap5.wordpress.com/