Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and The Bad News First (Kung Fu Treachery Press).

GOTTERDAMMERUNG by Howie Good

Welcome to the Age of Autonomous Machines, where the brown bears of Kamchatka are cold, ragged, and hungry, and under perpetual ban, and rivers brim with jizz and blood, and fish have the twisted mouths of stroke victims, where saints travel incognito on New York City subways and God speaks to them in a gravelly two-packs-a-day voice, where a peeling billboard declares it’s time to look ahead to the past, when the public gallows stood silhouetted at dusk against a sky of faded red plush.

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Blinking like a sick mole against the harsh white light of the desert, the last of the angels steps out of his winged chariot onto the hot tarmac. Little girls in braids present him with bouquets. Jeers erupt somewhere among the hundreds of people solemnly watching the ceremonies from behind a security fence. The plainclothesmen mixing with the crowd pepper-spray everyone within range. On the tarmac, meanwhile, a military band strikes up a brassy tune that has long been a favorite of dictators around the world. Birds hum along.

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I fall asleep to music, wake up to the barking of Soviet space dogs. We are apparently closer than I realized to the border of a bygone era. “Better call a repairman,” I whisper to my wife, who is standing on tiptoes, peering over my shoulder. By the time the repairman arrives, it is four in the afternoon and the sky has a long, black crack running down the middle. As he unpacks his tools, he volunteers that he has a titanium plate in his head. I nod numbly. Death, when it finally comes, will have his phlegmy eyes.

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AFTER AUSCHWITZ by Howie Good

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. – Theodor W. Adorno

We were taken off the train at night. “What are those bonfires?” I asked. A sarcastic male voice said from out of the dark, “You’ll find out, child.” It felt like I was on a bridge and there were two or three heavy trucks and the bridge was rocking—but there were no trucks. Even cows wondered what was happening. At one point we seemed to be following Beethoven’s footsteps through Vienna. Although democracy was dead, women and young girls were smashing jars of blood on the sidewalk in a ritual protest. Temporary deities would later tell us many other horrible things while machine guns swept the streets.

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“Last name?” the woman behind the counter asks, eyes on the computer screen, hands poised on the keyboard. “Good,” I say. She hesitates for half a second, then asks, “How do you spell that?” My body trembles like it’s not under my jurisdiction anymore. Meanwhile, Marlene is resting at home with a beer and the dude that shot her whose nickname is Rabbit. It has nothing to do with forgiveness. It’s simply that one person in six has never heard of the Holocaust. Freud said dreams are the day’s residue. I think of it sometimes when I see Nazis marching into Poland on the History Channel.

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All day and all night the air is thick with smoke that smells like burning hair. The men in authority, when confronted, can’t explain it. They don’t even try; they just gesticulate in front of the cameras. You live in fear of losing a crap job and never finding another near as good. I’m watching an emerald-throated hummingbird at the feeder so I don’t have to deal with all the bullshit. I don’t want to make this sound worse than it is, but there isn’t a lot else happening, just these assorted crises, each at a different point of unfolding. It’s an intricate universe. Heartache is everybody’s neighbor.

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DEATH LAB by Howie Good

Air Like PoisonHey, did you see those sea turtles down there? I often see them, though not as often or as many as I did before there were boats, the bridge, some buildings, even a small amusement park. Wherever they go, the turtles seem to leave a trail of watery stools behind. The ocean feels a little sick right now. There’s actually too much sunlight. And it all comes from the same place, a place with air like poison, where you can view the millstones that early New Englanders used to crush Giles Corey to death for being a witch.Grandson (with Apologies to Werner Herzog) Now that you’re almost 8 years old, you have to know how to travel on foot. You have to know how to make fire without matches. You have to know how to catch a trout with your bare hands. (It’s fairly easy. You just have to understand how the trout thinks.) You have to know how to forge a document, let’s say a gun permit, in a country under military rule. You have to know how to open a safety lock – surreptitiously, of course, with burglar tools. Most important, you have to know how to tell at a glance night from other darkness.Lost in BlockbusterThere are places a person can get lost and not even realize he’s lost. I had to cross the creek by tiptoeing over a rotting tree, ignoring as best I could whatever that was I felt grabbing for me with big, meaty hands. Some of you actually believe in fight, fight, fight, the three worst things you can do. So it wasn’t just happenstance that no one but me happened to be there, or that it was night by then, or that everything was also nothing, a lot like when the next to last Blockbuster Video store on Earth closed. 

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