Tag Archives: Howie Good

Howard Good

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Spooky Music

I feel the tingling in my chest that usually signals the onset of a panic attack, but instead, your nakedness spills like a crackle of lightning across the sheets, and I’m suddenly aware of the difference that makes and how without it social constructs would collapse and there would be shocking new twists to ancient myths, lifeguards drowning in kiddie pools, churches embracing sin and heresy, and the patron saint of shopping mall Santas, accompanied by spooky background music, sucking at Christ’s wounds, and first thing in the morning, too.

The Clock Strikes Thirteen

Fleeing for their lives, families brave oceans in paper boats, only to be turned back on reaching their destination. Caw-caw-caw, white crows cry, but less as frantic warning and more as bitter recrimination or desolate testimony. The living and the dead, the real and the imagined, the seen and the hidden, merge in a mirey mix at the behest of the home audience. Smoke from distant wildfires blots out the sky. None of those responsible will be held liable. The ancient Babylonian spirit that murders babies in the womb clings to the souls of mothers and speaks through their mouths.

Gosh

While seagulls swirl in the bright summer sky like silver foil confetti, I’m trapped under a boat dock. The water is up to my neck and rising. My dead cousin Rhonda miraculously appears. She looks down at me through the gaps between the wood planks. By now I’m struggling to keep my mouth out of the water, which reeks of gasoline and motor oil. “Why would you do this to us?” she scolds. I can hear people walking around above as if nothing terrible is happening. The worst atrocities aren’t on the news. I’m beginning finally to understand something about it.

Criminal History

The children in mandatory attendance have faces like wilted flowers. Poor humanity, always preparing for something that won’t ever happen or that already has. Investigators assigned to the case plant false evidence, intimidate witnesses, solicit bribes. Then one night the chalk outline of the body is mysteriously erased from the sidewalk. It doesn’t change the fact that every street is a crime scene, every person both a suspect and a victim. No one is perfectly innocent. My own heart rattles with bottled-up rage. Just before pronouncing sentence, the judge wipes his blubbery lips on the sleeve of his black robe.

Post-Op

I start hearing loud clanging and wake up in the hospital, where a face floating in and out of focus is saying, “You’re lucky to be alive.” “Oh?” I reply. I’m not there even though I am. Chimpanzees living in captivity will angrily throw their turds at their keepers. I just lie half-dazed under a thin blanket barely big enough to cover me. Beyond the curtain surrounding my bed, I can hear the visiting dead conferring. The ceiling when I glance up is swarming with their gray shadows. Yes, I fuzzily think to myself, I’m all but through. I can’t remember the life I had, only the one I should have.

Howie Good’s newest poetry collection, Frowny Face, a mix of his prose poems and collages, is now available from Redhawk Publications He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

Howie Good

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Murder! Fire! Plague!

The next morning you insisted, “There’s no such thing as love. There’s only fucking.” If you heard the gray gulls, their shrieks like symptoms of dementia, you gave no sign. It was a bit like that time the sun crashed down, flinging up dead cats and dung, and foreign words were blowing everywhere. There was this feeling among householders that something even more terrible — hooded gunmen with Kalishnikovs firing on police, a mom leaving her baby in a dumpster to freeze to death — would eventually happen. And, sure enough, darkness and flies entered despite the jar of buttercups on the table brightening the room.

The Heart of It All

Her eyes were sometimes blue, sometimes green with flecks of gold, all the things, restless things, I was instructed from early in life never to do. We found a high window filled day and night and laid down under it and moved slowly, so slowly that by morning we had rubbed each other as smooth as sea-smoothed shells. And when we rose up, the world looked strange. It was a place of beauty, I can tell you that, a circular path, spiraling even, and no one was really sure why but us.

From the Middle of Nowhere

No one could say when it was that the hospital began admitting children. At that time of night, the road is dark, and pedestrians don’t really go there. The next day only brought more illegibility, a slow-creeping rain during which bankrupts leaped out of windows. The police recommended calling if it happened again. Look around. A horse is not a metaphor. If I were you, I wouldn’t go out without a companion. What I assumed was the Atlantic, greasy and barely moving, a gull resting its head under a wing, may have been a new god seated on a throne of razor wire.

The Desert of the Real

It was a downtown full of ugly glass towers. I have never been able to understand the attraction to tall structures, have you? One evening I attended the city’s famous theater. A series of nudes rode across the stage on ostriches and camels under the admiring gaze of former Nazis in tuxedos. Afterward, in a reflective mood, I decided against taking the metro and to walk back to the hotel despite the fog and drizzle. A friend had recently killed herself. Pills. At her memorial service, the first eulogist had proclaimed, “To hell with facts!” I shook my head at the memory. About five minutes later, I stepped into the brightly lit lobby with an odd 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.

Blip

No one had ever told us what would happen in the event of defeat. Then the tornados showed up, sometimes alone, more often in pairs and small groups. Even the crows fell — or, rather, were blown — out of the sky. At least one man in attendance regarded it as a baleful omen. The rest assumed it was just a blip. But, very soon, antediluvian gods faded into rain, the flickering surface of uproarious dreams.

Howie Good’s latest poetry collections are Bad for the Heart (Prolific Press) and Dark Specks in a Blue Sky (Another New Calligraphy). He is recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his forthcoming collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 9)

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Welcome to Posit 9!

We love this first issue of 2016, which makes us think, in a number of different ways, about the expansive potential of artistic innovation. First, there is the incorporation and re-appropriation managed by the procedural poetry of Carlo Matos and Travis Macdonald, offering glimpses of the erased and remixed words of writers like Simone Muench, Mark Lamoureux, and Paul Killibrew. In addition, there is the implicit dialogue between new and previous work by returning contributors — in this issue: Darren C. Demaree, Howie Good, and Travis Macdonald. All of which reminds us of the extent to which art is, by definition, about incorporation and re-imagination, whether it is Anis Shivani’s Great Wall, Howie Good’s tornado, Robert McBrearty life story, Eileen Tabios’s litany of wonders and horrors, or the alchemical transformation of source material aced by every artist (visual as well as literary) featured in this exciting issue. So, it is with great pleasure that we invite you to peruse:

Darren C. Demaree’s spare, suggestive, “quiet, lowered /. . . roaring/ . . .& ecstatic” probings of identity, intimacy, and the quest for grace;

Samantha Duncan’s smart, tightly-wound, vivid constructions tracking a paradoxical “graduation from the gradient” via “veins that listen” to her extremely telling “curl/ of words;”

Raymond Farr’s wistful prosody, revealing “the sublime the ironic like a 5 o’clock shadow” where “love is a man ruled by the sun & not the itch in his bones” and “even this sad yellow paint has seven shades of itself;”

Howie Good’s somber prose poems populated by “a new god seated on a throne of razor wire,” “gray gulls, their shrieks like symptoms of dementia,” and “words, some bandaged, others still bleeding” mercifully leavened by irony, imagination, and even love;

Maja Lukic’s quietly intense evocations of cityscapes furnished with “gutted wind” and a sky which “promises to rain / money bags and emoji,” or offers snow like “cracked glitter, paw imprints in new dustings, / effigies of our old breath, frozen in the air;”

Travis Macdonald’s compelling remixes of poems by Killibrew and Lamoureux, demonstrating “how all true/going is taking” and raising intriguing questions about the relationship between vocabulary and voice;

Carlo Matos’ haunting erasures of Simone Muench’s Wolf Centos (themselves reconfigurations of other poetic texts), troubling our assumptions about center vs periphery, absence vs presence, and the loud voice of the unsaid, “when tenderness/nestles down/with her she-mask” — “sans teeth, sans/you;”

Robert Garner McBrearty’s impossibly compressed microfiction, in which the task of writing his companion’s life story deteriorates to stunning effect;

Cindy Savett’s intriguing invitation to follow her on “a trip where the babies lie flat/ tracing resistance with their fingertips” leading us careening “down the middle in an instant of delight,” only to stand speechless wondering “how do I sing of white lilacs and pine?”

Anis Shivani’s virtuosic bricolage of allusive musicality and aphoristic insights nailing “art, the fleabite to time,” transforming “partial manuscripts signed/ by the angels of detritus” into “experimental gardens . . . [imbued with] the nuance of musicality;”

Eileen R. Tabios’ masterful litany of all that could never again be forgotten, once she “composed this song that would turn you into ice, so that you will know with my next note what it means to shatter into tiny pieces the universe will ignore;”

and Leah Umansky’s inspired revelations of the “satisfaction in seeing the day as something clear for landing or for sending off” where “once, there was the falling of night and I was alone with its steepness, and . . . felt I was a pooling of light; a door-sliver and golden beam.”

Thank you, as ever, for reading.

Susan Lewis and Bernd Sauermann

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And welcome to the visual art of Posit 9!

Keren Kroul’s complex and beautiful paintings evoke maps of imaginary countries or the pathways of the brain. The individual sections stand strongly on their own, but conjoined in the large grids presented here, they make a statement that is simultaneously bold and intimate. The sum is as beautiful as the parts.

The mixed media sculptures of Sydney Ewerth turn our expectations about space and materials topsy-turvy. Her play with the object and its painted shadows confounds our expectations even while her materials and colors delight the eye. Her aesthetic is clear and the work masterful.

Don Porcaro choreographs an elegant dance between the two- and three-dimensional pieces presented here. It is evident how his work in one medium reverberates into another. His colorful and almost playful forms belie the serious artistic concerns that underlie this evocative body of work.

The lyrical paintings of Sarah Slavick are reminiscent of the movement of water, wind and sand. The rhythm and dynamism of her patterns are mesmerizing, with light and color moving through and around them, underscoring their complexity.

Mariah Karson presents a fascinating vision of landscape, whether it be the interior landscapes of abandoned school buildings or the poetics of isolated buildings in desolate settings. The solitude in her photographs is profound, and perhaps a little lonely. However, she frames this vision with a clarity that is elegant and precise.

Cheers!
Melissa Stern