qarrtsiluni

by Howie Good

Spermicidal

I ask if you remember the story headlined FIRE. You slowly circle the parking lot again, searching for a close-in spot. We’re the ghosts of our own thoughts — or no, a character in each other’s stories. At the track your horse stumbles. Potential orphans pass us on the stairs. We’re far from the ocean. I watch a bird that looks like the bird that picks the crocodile’s teeth.

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Cannibals & Missionaries

A man sits alone in a room, staring at the fire like Descartes, broken glass in his beard. There are things for which he doesn’t know the reasons. He throws his arms around a horse’s neck on a street in Turin and bursts into tears. Someone slits someone’s throat. And where did the bullet come from? Death is just like a pink eraser, only more so.

* * *

Uneasy Dreams

1

Mix a little gunpowder with saliva. Memory is a building, a fountain, a madman who becomes calm on seeing a sheep. In floats an empty word balloon. It shimmers like the ashes of some extinct halo.

2

You dread the cough of a stranger. Agents sent to investigate force the prisoner to kneel. The hand that stops moving still holds a pen. Your ancestors saw so many witches they ran out of stakes to burn them all. I wipe my eyes; I was once a fan of riddles myself. Tiny flying things with grinning monster faces continue their dance.

3

Fireworks in my chest, and there’s a fresh dusting of snow, a white hare without fur or bones.

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Howie Good is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011).

The phones are dead, our children, unreachable,
unless that’s one of them crying in the street.

Everything simple has become complex.
I should’ve known we’d be abandoned

to vandals and the weather,
and, before heartbreak had vaporized,

admitted to the priesthood of grief,
but my thoughts were taken up with other things,

the advantages of probity versus confession.
Now the three-legged black dog next door,

moved by the poor moon’s blistered face,
growls all night in grisly sympathy.

by Howie Good

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Sure, you’ve reasons to weep,
who hasn’t, but, please,

you still have me, with shelf
upon disorganized shelf of inventory,

so what if the sun sticks its thumb
in your eye and the ATM refuses you,

so what if the guests leave
for the wedding and never arrive,

from somewhere there’s loud
and incoherent hammering,

rockets with bright tails
tilting toward the void,

another solar system built just for you
out of love and cannibalized parts.

by Howie Good

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The librarian doesn’t care
as she once might have
that the books I’m returning
are missing some words.
Then I come to a forest,
dark, mossy clouds
like morbid thoughts
not even drugs can dispel.
A yellow cab, its engine running,
is always waiting at the curb
for a messiah to appear.
It’s the difference between
a democracy and a republic,
and though there’s no wind,
the puddles shiver.
My face reminds most people
of someone they knew long ago,
before the assassinations
and roadside bombings.
I stop to rest with the newborn
on the border of shrill gulls.

by Howie Good

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