Howie Good

 

Everything That Isn’t Predator Is Prey

You can kill, you just can’t murder. Note the subtle distinction. It’s part of the terrible shit going on, political stooges firing bazookas and the police visiting anyone who tattooed a swastika on their baby’s forehead. I myself might be wanted for crimes of which I am guilty but of which I am also completely unaware. Lined up in front of an execution squad, a half-dozen or more women, naked and helpless, have their arms crossed shyly over their breasts, modest to the very end.

 

Donut Run

The oncologist avoided looking at me while somberly reviewing the results of my latest CT scan. It was as bad as receiving the original cancer diagnosis over the phone 15 months earlier, maybe even worse. Regardless, I had promised the boys to get donuts on the way home. I pulled up at the drive-through window. A large, squishy woman with tight blonde curls filled the space. I handed her a ten and change; she handed me the box of donuts. “Have a nice day, hon,” she said. She couldn’t know what she was asking.

 

Middle of the Night

A Facebook “friend,” a painter, loved paint so much that he drank a jar of it. It was a strange time for me, too. I had to cancel the adult ed course I was scheduled to teach, “Are You Really an Ethical Person?”, when Franz Kafka appeared to me. “To destroy is to exist,” he exulted as he burned unpublished manuscripts in the fireplace. His on-again, off-again fiancée, Felice Bauer, was like Marilyn Monroe in that she often didn’t wear undies. “We’ll meet again,” he told her, “but on one condition – we get divorced.” In the morning my wife angrily reported that I woke her in the middle of the night laughing in my sleep.

 

Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose new poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.