Armed agents conceal themselves in doorways and behind lampposts and newspapers. You just passed by one and didn’t even know you had. Time to electrocute your thinking. They’re paid to spy, and they spy on people like me – an old man walking a dog on a rope – who’ve done nothing wrong. I can’t sleep through the night for worry that they’re building a dossier against me by twisting something I said. Is it becoming a grass armchair? A black wall? A crying mirror? If it is, I’m finished. One day I’ll squeeze into a crowded elevator that’ll disappear between floors.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest collections are I’m Not a Robot from Tolsun Books and A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submissions Press. 

Whenever I fly into a foreign country, I’m afraid I’ll be dragged into a room and forced to answer questions I’ll fail to understand. “You can do better,” the examiner will say, just before firing an electric current through the alligator clips attached to my ears. By the time I’m released from custody, I’ll be bent, shriveled, gnome-like, and afflicted with tremors. These events repeat themselves in my mind on a loop, every recurrence worse than the last, now involving sleep deprivation, now an inmate orchestra playing a German requiem, now corpses sprawled half in, half out of broken caskets.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest poetry collections are I’m Not a Robot from Tolsun Books and A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submissions Press. 

One person in six hasn’t heard of the Holocaust, doesn’t know what it is, a planet of smoke and flames. Seventy year ago my relatives didn’t believe it was there, and then they walked through the gate and under the slogan, Arbeit Macht Frei, and found they suddenly had a dismal view of God’s back from inside the barbed wire. So I look around, and though the times are terrifying, try to act like a kind of thunderstorm blue, like I can see clouds in the shape of a woman’s mighty body and feel the rain that hasn’t fallen yet.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest collections are I’m Not a Robot from Tolsun Books and A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submissions Press. 

What sounds implausible in most languages, a flock of winged skulls hovering on the wind, happens three or four times before I admit, yes, this is real. I hurl stones at the skulls and jeer when they fly off in all directions. “Are you kidding me?” a man hurrying past says. “Don’t you realize how dangerous that is?” I do, but it’s not like we have much choice. Troops have draped public buildings in protective netting. The police are going around with guns drawn. Meanwhile, school kids have been taught to hide under their desks, you know, just in case.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest poetry collections are I’m Not a Robot from Tolsun Books and A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel from Analog Submissions Press.

I feel like a gull getting sucked into a jet engine. Furniture salesmen, spies, serial killers, etc., take turns following me through town. I recognize them by their nondescript appearance. Private lives are now being lived in public. We’re a wandering soap opera. That’s the problem with putting Velveeta on enchiladas. And nobody has to ask what the Kremlin thinks about all of this. Traces are visible from the air. I just want some semblance of normality back in my life, some sort of quiet, and my heart to stop furiously pedaling as if there were actually somewhere to go.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie co-edits the journals UnLost and Unbroken with Dale Wisely.

Crime was common back then, and the law itself often criminal. Nobody was safe from the thugs prowling the city. It took constant and wearying vigilance to survive. If I happened to fall asleep, I’d wake up afraid. I think I was afraid she wouldn’t be there, peering out through a crack in the curtains. Why you here? I asked the first time she appeared. She just gave a fuzzy, fragile smile. The ambiguity was intentional. When you leave details out, it opens up possibilities for what can be – an ancient tree whose entwined branches support 34 brilliantly burning candles.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie co-edits the journals UnLost and Unbroken with Dale Wisely

A panhandler with the woeful face of a Christian martyr in a medieval painting stops me outside the discount liquor store. He says he needs two more bucks to get a bottle. Marlene, he adds as if I know her, is resting with a beer and the dude that shot her whose nickname is Rabbit. Has anyone asked us how we see things? No! We’re all on the road. But now it’s really getting fun. I dig some change out of my pocket. There are only so many opportunities to take maximum advantage of gravity’s pull on people and objects.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good