Howie Good - What Makes the Dark So Dark

You didn’t look like you anymore. I wasn’t there even when I was. We were living a life of shadows, of echoes, and with some particles capable of switching between the two. “Hey,” the train conductor said, “you all right?” I was like yes, yes, yes, I want to do this. Out the window, I saw these arched backs, these women working side by side in the fields, and then an old barn sagging under the blood and gold of sundown.


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We’re living in very unusual times, and more than a few women read true crime books about serial killers just to gather survival tips. “OK,” they silently remind themselves, “I don’t get into the Volkswagen.” Some know what a knuckle duster is. Some were named after characters in now-defunct soap operas. Some, as a joke, take selfies in the spotted mirrors of public restrooms. Some are depressed on Sundays. You want to find out if this is in you. I’m no psychologist, or any other kind of -ologist, but, before you go to bed at night, look at the darkness.


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I’ve given up trying to translate bird language into English. Nothing can persuade the crows in particular to speak clearer, whether they’re confessing petty crimes, or bragging, or retelling jokes. Everything about this might be more bearable if the dark wasn’t so dark. When I strike a match, a confusing mist surrounds the flame. At times I resolve to become like the drunks who, sufficiently enraged, can just shrug off the effects of being tasered. Other times what interests me isn’t success, but love, how the next person adds onto it without knowing all its nimble and sinister tricks.

Howie Good - 3 prose poems

How to Cope with a Crisis

Maggie swore she’d just seen John the Baptist searching behind the couch for his missing head. Someone should tell him, she said over the party noises, poor hygiene doesn’t make you look badass. Meanwhile, in every room, even the bathrooms, there were paintings. I took that as a sign of an ongoing crisis in representational art. Then a bird happened to fly in while the door was left open for the dogs. None of us guests could catch it as it ricocheted off tables, mirrors, walls. There was only one thing to do – kick out the windows and scream, “Fire!”

Air Like Poison

Hey, 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, too much air like poison. And it all comes from the same place, a collected disarray of memory and daydreams, 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 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. You have to know how to tell at a glance night from other darkness.

Howie Good - Three Pieces

1. How to Prepare for Heartbreak
Summoning up
a kind of rage,
stubbornly walk,
or even crawl,
across a frozen sea
and then pass
through a hole in a fence,
on the other side
of which it’s dusk,
and maybe always is,
no people anywhere,
just stubble fields
and a black dog
with a red tongue.

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2. Factory
This isn’t the best place to work. The roof is burning. We might as well be mannequins for all the concern we’re allowed to display. It’s like a test of some sort. Smoke begins to seep into the building, and my eyes tear up. The temp worker standing opposite me on the assembly line chews on the middle links of her thin gold necklace, a nervous habit that under other conditions would be endearing but now just irritates me. We work in silence, heads bent forward, hands moving as if diabolically programmed to perform brutal stabbing gestures over and over.

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3. OMG
The police had dogs. They even had helicopters. They tried to kill a child to shut her up. I searched among the dead and injured and couldn’t find her. A crow in a tree made a noise like “Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!” as if finding the circumstances amusing. I responded, “No, no, no!” Everyone thought I was crazy. They failed to notice those didn’t resemble normal clouds up there, but angels tracking in blood on their sneakers.

Howie Good - Three Prose Poems

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1

Sex Ed

We’ll again be able to walk from here to the Netherlands. I just don’t know exactly when. Sex is also a great form of exercise. Yeah, every day. And it doesn’t require a lot of foreknowledge. I should close my eyes. I should. But, instead, we just go, “Wow.” If you think it could be, but then say, “No, it's not like that,” go with your initial instinct. What's most challenging is seeing the same story repeated over and over again. We’re not inventing anything; we’re just stealing from others really well.

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2

Death Notice

Friends I haven’t seen in years have told each other I died in 2012 under sordid circumstances – debt-ridden, detested, abandoned by everyone, communicating only with pigeons in a Boston park. Actually, I still have feeling in pretty much every part of my body. We used to wear cufflinks and tie clips. Now there are flash drives and meth cooks and what sound like gunshots. People need to be careful. Autocorrect can take you only so far. Do we even sleep? Sometimes we erase a memory here and there, but that’s it.

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3

Blue Love

When the police arrive, chairs and tables and cups are flying everywhere. The police have dogs. They have helicopters. I stand on the sidewalk, just trying to seem normal. Some people are dealing drugs; others, dumping bodies. I see something big floating. At first I think it’s a dead cow. Then it flips around and looks at me, and I say, “Tiffany, it's a bear!” We all start laughing because it’s hard to believe. It’s like getting a blue hug from the sky.