Three Poems by Howie Good

The Desert of the Real Revisited

It was a city full of ugly glass towers. I have never been able to understand the attraction to tall structures, have you? There was one memorable evening that I attended the theater. A series of nudes rode across the stage on ostriches and camels under the admiring gaze of old former Nazis in tuxedos. Afterward, as I walked back to the boarding house, a .22 short buzzed my head. A band immediately struck up a rousing patriotic song. I reached my miserable little room with a feeling of relief, only to discover that none of it had happened, that it was all merely a collection of words, some bandaged, others still bleeding.
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Go Fish

I was searching for the goldfish I had won at the Bucks County Fair as a kid. The search stretched on for years. I heard a persistent hum, but couldn’t find the street that I had been told was there. One night on the news witnesses described a foreign-looking man who had elbowed them getting off the Metro. I wondered whether they could possibly mean me. The next morning was cold even for April. When I caught up with a co-worker in the parking lot, she made a stricken face. An old pair of sneakers dangled from the power line like a clue. I sensed, if only for a dangerous instant, the secret thoughts of ordinary things.
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A Danger to Self or Others

Although it was spring, Elizabeth regretted saying, “I love you.” That was at least forty years ago. Then today, walking to class, I noticed the trees along the path had begun to bud again, a possible danger to self or others. The girl with pink-striped hair who always sits in the back of the room raised her hand during discussion and asked, “What’s an id?” I may have closed my eyes for a second before answering, “Eighteenth-century sea captains carousing in Surinam.”

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY at New Paltz, is the author of several poetry collections, including most recently Beautiful Decay and The Cruel Radiance of What Is from Another New Calligraphy and Fugitive Pieces from Right Hand Pointing Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.