Autumn’s Menace

A plainclothes policeman, using a pair of handcuffs as brass knuckles, cut the face of a boy who was wandering the city in a hospital gown. Sometimes I think it’s just not true that teaching a child to not step on a caterpillar will make you a better person. Sometimes I think the plainclothesman is going to walk through the door, but he hasn’t, so I keep waiting. The city streets are deserted – no parade floats, no people. In these slow days of unease, everyone is a biohazard.

Past Is Prologue

Paris, January 6, 1938. Samuel Beckett was returning from the cinema that night when he was accosted by a tramp, who stabbed him in the chest, just missing his heart. He wasn’t quite the same afterwards. Maps needed to be redrawn. I’m beginning to understand something about it. The ocean feels a little sick right now. Two teenage boys beat a homeless man to death in the park with their skateboards. Stop talking and look up. Ladders cross the blue sky in a wheel of fire. 

Doe-Re-Me

I am writing
at the kitchen table, 
or, rather, 
struggling to, 
when my wife 
excitedly calls me 
to the window 

and points down 
into the yard 
where a doe 
with a coat 
just a shade 
from golden 
is browsing 

on fallen leaves
that if it wasn’t 
for the hours 
I spend trying 
to make poems, 
I would have 
burned long ago. 



Post-Election Stress Disorder

The emperor’s model army marches on, 
bringing with them the suffocating smell of smoke, 
a darkness like mud, while tens of millions 
of just plain folks artlessly demonstrate their devotion 
by cheering threats of kidnapping and murder 
and parading bright new flags that with each wave
in the lie-filled air grow duller and more tattered,  
and when the light dwindles to a final few hours, 
there will be tweet storms and wild speeches
and the military music of boots stamping on faces.

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Howie Good is the author of The Death Row Shuffle, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.