“OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW”
1
Teenage waitresses shiver naked in the train yard, machine guns poking at them and the tip jar empty.
2
All light is interesting, a face full of stubble, and all because of a hole blown in the tower, with the cannibals and madmen belching fire, and morning declared against the law.
3
A moose walks across the field. The sun is setting. Maybe from a great distance you can see an old woman in a dark shawl carrying an unrecognizable bundle into the gathering gloom. It’s kind of beautiful in a way, a place you’d like to go if you knew how to get there.
Based in part on sentences found in the online edition of The New York Times, August 10, 2011.
TOOT SWEET
1
Landscape
without trees
or anything.
Not even barren –
nothing.
2
Something passed overhead,
the world’s first.
I told her what I wanted to be.
Who, she laughed, you?
3
The outlet emptied
into a dirty white hand.
Merde!
(Anything
said
sounds
better
said
in French.)
4
Fields of sunflowers
that go on all the way
to the Great Lakes
and Saskatchewan,
take me in your mouth.
DREAMING IN RED
1
I was nothing, no one, plunging across the sky, a man’s face that wasn’t mine, the silence so acute it glittered like silvery gray barracuda disturbing the depths.
2
What do you want, Howie? What? Only the thing I was promised, goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace to gather somewhere and wait for me. Oy! Under various rubble, I’m broken and mended and broken again.
3
I had someone else’s blood dripping into me all night. My own blood was sick. A nurse woke me up every fifteen minutes, once in the middle of a dream where I was younger than you and beautiful and flying in echelon over the dry white oceans of the moon.
FAMILY SECRETS
1
I look up the word
“fugacious,”
though I know
I won’t ever use it.
My mother’s old apron
hangs on a hook.
I wait for the rain to stop
and then remember
she’s dead.
The caption asks
which things don’t belong.
2
My people were peasants and horse thieves
in the old country. An erratic uncle
hanged himself after they came to the new.
Sometimes he waves. No one waves back.
Profile: Howie Good
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