Poems from Howie Good

THIS LIFE IS DANGEROUS

There are only so many words we’re supposed to use in each sentence. You can’t
remember the exact number either. Sometimes we’re forced to communicate with
small, tenuous gestures. Other times I shut my eyes and try to calculate how far, given
the wind currents, a scream will carry. A story often simply stops at some point rather
than fully concludes. When that happens, the blue-black night starts churning and even
old-fashioned baby carriages bob up to the surface.

 

THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

She was doing her eyes in the rearview mirror as I drove. I felt a constant urge to give
everyone the finger. She nodded as if this was normal, by which I mean something
we shared. Passages of plagiarized music were running through my head. She told me
she occasionally heard a series of gunshots, ten or more, on her voice mail. We might
have been staring out at a sunlit picture of hell. Someone had left behind a pair of little
brown birds in a crooked tree.