Howie Good I need an ornate new alphabet to say what I mean, a pull-down eye chart, a small Midwestern city known for its homicides, a window that only I can open, a foreign museum dedicated to magpies, a woman just back from there climbing naked into bed, and all around us, dipping and soaring, the vibration of wings. Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick...

Howie Good 1 Men are arrested overnight with nothing of mine in their pockets. I sleep late, while the morning, face full of gray stubble, waits downstairs. In another kind of world, I might have had my name and occupation detailed on a window in gold lettering. 2 The music is keeping secrets, but also telling stories. And I quote: Winning doesn’t feel as good as losing feels bad. Come autumn, the fog lingers longer, clocks fall back...

Howie Good What weather! We hang around the house all day, increasingly restless, like assassins for hire without an assignment. On one channel, there’s a question about who invented the combustion engine; on another, the start of a celebrity death watch. You and I were friends before we were a couple, but unreliable narrators before we were either. Light gathered us to itself, and I think I could hear, if you turn down the TV just a...

Howie Good 1 A man jammed fistfuls of earth into his mouth. And why not when nations sell weapons to their enemies? The weather arrived late, a funeral with only four mourners. All his life he liked to wander through cemeteries. If everyone is doing it, someone said, it must be OK. 2 Probably the first paint was animal blood. He asked for a razor. Born on a cold day, he took with him a heart always about to break. He was found, years...

Howie Good The crowded elevator disappeared between floors. Pedestrians stood weeping at the crosswalk. She still loves you, said the old man walking a dog on a rope. I smelled the salt of the nearby tears. It took two or three matches before the light would stay lit. Howie Good is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Lovesick, as well as 21 print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently, Hello, Darkness,...

The poet reads and discusses his process and aesthetic.

Howie Good 1 Pilots called them Flying Coffins. He scanned the dingy sky. The war had just started. Tourists listened in a daze to a cunning old woman who had outlived all her children. 2 His heart started going like an antiaircraft gun, a spy caught leaving coded messages. Dusk seemed to fall by 2 p.m. Reporters interviewed mothers with dead children in their arms. The wind from the heights acquired a touch of red. Look out the window,...

Howie Good Oh, habitués of the walk-in clinic! Oh, aficionados of the cockpit voice recorder! Nothingness isn’t something you sleep off in a doorway. The buildings are full of forgotten vaudevillians and signs that say EXIT, and every panhandler demonstrates the doubtful efficacy of begging. Light slows to a trickle. The sun has gone behind a cloud. Minutes stumble like horse thieves leaning over the necks of stolen horses. Howie Good...

Howie Good I give you green troops to plug a gap mutinies and desertions have torn in the line. I give you burning towers as the only discernible source of light. I give you a Christmas tree farm continuously crying. I give you expired pills, a book on death, something machine-made and frivolous to wear. I give you another day of me explaining night with my hands. Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at...

Howie Good As mourners do, I’ll cover the mirrors before I go out and still arrive in time for the last showing. The seats around me will all be empty, but toward the end, when even the music stops caring what happens next, the heavy-set usherette will prowl the aisles of another gloomy day. She’ll be there and then she won’t, and she’ll shine her stinging light in my face. Howie Good is a journalism professor at the State...