Abruptly and without my bidding, Alexa announces from her place on the shelf that she’s going to play a selection of music based on my “listening history.” She says it like it’s a good thing. What I might’ve accepted yesterday now for some reason feels kind of intrusive, a digital home invasion. As I fret over the possibility that my computer devices have designs on me, my grandsons, ages 5 and and 11, collapse on the couch, clutching their sides and laughing. They know something I’d momentarily forgotten, that here are only three states of matter, solid, liquid, and farts.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest poetry books are The Horse Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press, and Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems from Redhawk Publications.

Survivors with faded numbers tattooed on their wrinkled forearms slowly reboard the tourist bus. The archives they were supposed to visit burned down months ago. Yahweh beckons me forward with a curled finger. Don’t make eye contact, I remind myself. Seconds later I feel the blast wave on my cheek. It also knocks off my hat. “Look!” Yahweh booms in his usual angry voice. “Remember!” There are clouds, come evening, that will resemble bleeding stigmata. There are birds that return to nests in the eyeholes of skulls. I could try to explain it to anyone who asks. No one asks.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

The sky that bleeds at dawn burns at dusk. I steep in the blood and flames as a kind of penance, but not for doing a recognizable wrong – for doing nothing. The honey bees are diseased and dying. The birds on the wire shake as though likewise afflicted. From somewhere nearby comes a shockingly loud bang. “Was that a gunshot?” I ask the first person I see stumble out, a diminutive woman of indeterminate age with unnaturally bright red hair. She squeezes my arm and begs for help. But I also would rather do the tying than be tied up.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest poetry books are The Horse Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press, and Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems from Redhawk Publications.

A college-age girl collecting money – no doubt for a worthy cause – rings the doorbell, sending our little white dog into a barking frenzy. Sorry, I tell her after kicking aside the dog to get to the door, but we gave last week. She doesn’t believe me. I can read it in the sudden hardening of her face. If anything, she’s probably thinking it’s necessary sometimes to kill what is in order to bring about what is not. I start to shut the door and then stop and glance up the street. The falling leaves die saying, I want to go.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good’s latest poetry book is The Horse Were Beautiful (2022), available from Grey Book Press. Redhawk Publications is publishing his collection, Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems, later this year.

At that late hour, the streets were deserted. I wandered the dirty sidewalks in a kind of amnesic daze. Somehow I had gotten lost in a part of town I thought I knew well. Familiar landmarks had simply disappeared. I didn’t recognize the faces of buildings or the signs on storefronts. My own footfalls sounded weirdly detached from me. After only twenty minutes of this, I felt as though I had been running, falling, flying, floating, crawling half the night. I sat down on the curb exhausted. Clouds shaped like vague suspicions of vast conspiracies were just starting to pinken.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest poetry book is The Horses Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press.

Meanwhile, Franz Kafka sells another piece of his dead mother’s jewelry to pay for his brothel visits. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse go horseback riding together. Alma Mahler has just aborted their child. The police question Picasso, but he has an alibi and they release him after slapping him around. Summer is fading, and Rainer Maria Rilke feels it as a wound in his chest. Using an alias, Adolf Hitler boards a train for Munich to escape conscription in the Austro-Hungarian army. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is missing from the Louvre. Museumgoers lay flowers in front of the bare wall.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s latest poetry collection, THE HORSES WERE BEAUTIFUL, is forthcoming from Grey Book Press.

There were days when the explosions didn’t subside. The sirens became more and more frequent, especially at night. We began to sleep badly. Then one morning, while hurrying to the market, I was struck by flying debris. At the hospital the doctor first looked around to make sure no one was listening who shouldn’t be. “I just need to grab a lab coat and one egg and I can fix this,” he said. He cut my feet open and put pennies in the incisions before sewing them back up and wrapping them in bandages. He said they were lucky pennies.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is a poet and collage artist on Cape Cod. His latest poetry books are Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press) and The Bad News First (Kung Fu Treachery Press).

Robots Contest Entry:

I was born in the rain and dark. “Cure me or kill me,” I begged the doctors in attendance. But apparently only when silent was I able to be heard. I’d been assembled by someone who couldn’t be bothered to read the assembly instructions. Seventy years later, I look in the mirror and see bits and pieces of a stranger’s face – a long, fleshy nose, protuberant eyes, a domelike Shakespearean forehead. My now grown children stand well off to the side, uncertain whether to huddle or flee. As I tentatively approach, I clutch a rose, shoulder high like a dagger.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie’s books include the prose poetry collection THOUGHT CRIMES, scheduled to be published in fall 2022.

Everything appears gray or white, and after only a few days, I start to miss seeing things that are green. The people I depend on for advice don’t want to talk about it or even acknowledge a problem exists. I scan the morning headlines. Bosnians are still finding in woods and fields and under building rubble bodies from the genocide their leaders claim never happened. A year passes, two. The dentist bangs on my tooth. “That hurt?” he asks. I smell grass, hear birds chirp. It hurts. So what? A bird hasn’t an arm but the continent of the sky.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is the co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022.

I’m told to go sit in the waiting area while “the laser heats up,” and for an instant, I’m not at the clinic or some anxious old man unable to see out his left eye, I’m with Sean Connery/James Bond in Dr. No, the scene where he’s tied spreadeagle on a steel table, and even as the fiery red laser beam that cuts through metal creeps closer and closer and closer to his, you know, “junk,” he banters with the archvillain, demonstrating to each of us caught in our own desperate straits the art of living bravely under imaginary circumstances.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is the co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022.