Howie Good

Cemetery of Buried Feelings

He would flip on the light in my room. I would pretend to be asleep. He would loom over me until my eyes opened. Fear would distort my breathing. The walls would seem to lean in. If I tried to scoot away, he would grab me by the arm and drag me back and crack me across the face with the flat of his hand. He was buried last month on a cold Sunday next to my mother. Some thirty people, mostly family, attended. It began to snow as we stood at the graveside. He had finally found a solution to his loneliness.

 

A Plea

Both my parents are dead.
All my aunts and uncles, too.

And several older cousins.
Even a nephew, from an overdose.

Sometimes in the cold of night
I feel like I’m just waiting my turn.

Promise that when it takes me,
you’ll wear a black arm band on your left arm,

the arm nearest the heart.

 

Elon Musk at Auschwitz

The world’s richest man, who claims for self-aggrandizement to be aspirationally Jewish, Jewish by association, passes under the wrought-iron sign over the entrance: Arbeit macht frei, a German phrase meaning "Work sets you free." Seeing the barbed wire fences and the barracks and the smoke-blackened ovens of the crematorium in person is different than just looking at pictures. I have cousins from New York who went on a group tour of the most notorious Nazi death camps in Poland. They said it was good. You walk the two miles between Auschwitz and Birkenau, where altogether more than a million people were murdered. It’s called “The March of the Living” and occurs once a year. Starved for words, the ghosts howl.

 

Howie Good's newest book, Frowny Face, is a collection of his prose poems and handmade collages from Redhawk Publications. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.