Howie Good's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.
Clouds
“Alexa, what’s the weather in Hyannis tomorrow?” I asked last night before bed. “Tomorrow in
Hyannis, Massachusetts,” Alexa said, “look for clouds . . . ,” and I thought, I don’t have to look
for clouds, clouds appear without my having to go look for them. I grew up in a house on
suburban Dunsinane Drive, named for Macbeth’s gloomy Scottish castle by a home developer
obsessed with Shakespeare. My dad floated in and out, a figment of my imagination. My mom
often stayed in bed crying. I wore tatty hand-me-downs from my cousins. In medieval times our
ancestors were compelled by law to wear pointed hats and yellow badges. It’s a myth that a wolf
will gnaw off its own leg to escape a trap.
Fishing For Jews
A swarthy, black-bearded man came walking down the street carrying a fishing pole with a
dollar bill dangling like bait from the hook. Another man was recording it all on his iPhone to
share later on social media. He called what they were doing “fishing for Jews” and chuckled. It
sickened me, especially the prospect of hundreds, maybe thousands of people online laughing at
their grotesque antics. Others see us as they need us to be, as kin to the kind of insects that eat
dung. But I am more than my assigned role in their twisted imaginings, more than a thieving,
slobbery, long-nosed caricature of a human being. They can beat us. They can debase us. They
can seize and enslave us. They can lynch us from lampposts. And they have. We are here
regardless, the dead who won’t stay dead.
Things Burn
I was more than just normally tired. All the previous night a legless beggar seated on a board
with wheels had clattered over the cracked sidewalks of the invisible world. “Why would you do
this to us?” the frozen embryos that never became babies scolded. I tossed and turned in bed, but
the dead woman lying beside me hardly stirred. Later when interviewed, she could only recall
hazy remnants of a curious dream. If it had been now, they would have inserted a newly
developed specially shaped tube into a blood vessel in the arm or leg, allowing them to carve
their initials on the walls of her heart.