Poe in Love

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 later, wearing only one shoe. Some of his stories from that period are spattered with raindrops.

3
He picked cherries from the tree and threw them down to her. Everything yearned toward everything else. She was there no more than three or four minutes, her white dress dashed with blood as bright as the cherries she caught.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011).