With the encouragement of family and friends, I adopted a retired bomb-sniffing dog. I called him “Flash” – after the flashing lights of a migraine, I would joke to anyone who asked. One day he discovered under the couch a severed doll’s head I didn’t even know I had. Next the piano stopped producing sounds when I sat down to play it. Then the tree outside my window appeared suspended like an astronaut in space. Now I often catch the dog lying on the couch studying me with cold, squinty eyes as if calculating exactly how much a person can bear.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of THE DEATH ROW SHUFFLE, a poetry collection forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Oompah-pah music and traditional German drinking songs floated up from the street festival into the third-floor courtroom. I shifted uneasily from foot to foot as I stood before the scowling judge. One prosecution witness after another had described in specious detail my attitudes, conversations, habits, and interests. There was even testimony about the transparent Jewishness of my penis. Now it was finally my turn to speak. I had just begun when the judge interjected, “Spare us your life philosophy.” His face was grave. He studied me with cold, squinty eyes as if calculating exactly how much a person can bear.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of THE DEATH ROW SHUFFLE, a poetry collection forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

From the street outside, a loudspeaker boomed, “According to the decree of the 17th of this month on the Abolition of Walls.” I got up from the table where I was reading and went over to the window. Banners with the slogan “Public Interest Comes Before Self-Interest” fluttered in endless repetition down the street. Practically right under my window, officers were clubbing a man who lay crumpled on the pavement. I sighed, then went and sat back down and found my place in the book – sea nymphs with red seaweed hair were sunning themselves on the ledges of seaside cliffs.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of THE DEATH ROW SHUFFLE, a poetry collection forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

I said to the doctor, “I’m dying.” He said, “How’s that my fault?” I had been shedding parts for at least a week. The doctor said it was my body attacking itself. “It’ll scald you,” he said in the same confidential manner, “peel the skin and muscle right off your bones.” The exam room then filled with people I didn’t know, one a crying toddler, her face all red and sweaty and scrunched up. Apparently, serious preparations for horizontal descent were underway. There was nothing else I could think of that would explain why this murdering old world trembled so.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of THE DEATH ROW SHUFFLE, a poetry collection forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

The sun was shining for once, and I was sitting out on the patio with a book, Clare Carlisle’s Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard, open on my lap, while I stared off into the middle distance, trying to think of a specific skill my angry beautiful workaholic father had taught me growing up – how to change the oil in a car, for example, or restring a steel-string acoustic guitar, or make sourdough starter from scratch – and I couldn’t, I couldn’t think of one, unless, that is, you consider being a yellow bull’s eye a skill.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

You stared out at our radiant world with an intense, even belligerent, expression. A ratty top hat, at least half a size too small, sat on your head at a treacherous angle. Your gaunt, wrinkled cheeks might have come from having lived on the street or being tortured in some foreign jail for political crimes, but didn’t. These were the years you renamed yourself, smoked a white clay pipe, worked in a carnival of night sweats and empty thought bubbles. Sometimes the stock market cratered. Other times you just wished we each could experience the irony of posthumous cult status.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of What It Is and How to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections.

Thinking about escaping across closed borders, I dug a hole outside. It was hard work. I pulled out bricks, barbed wire, glass bottles and jars, and old cans as I dug deeper. When my mind drifted too far into sadness, I stopped. Everything moves slowly now. I’m learning to be very stingy with supplies. On the table is a bunch of flowers I found in the trash. This may be a day for catching up on The Walking Dead, but I stand at a window that looks out on a yard. Somehow, just standing there feels like a hopeful gesture.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of What It Is and How to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections.

It’s like a post-apocalyptic movie. A usually bustling city is eerily vacant. Essential supplies have come to include liquor, guns, and toilet paper. Who isn’t secretly embarrassed? Around midnight I take a puzzle apart just for the hell of it. The next morning my department holds a Zoom session on how to prevent cheating in online classes. Other professors mention they also have been having strange dreams. In mine, I’m eating Crown Fried Chicken on a bench while eyeballs the size of boulders roll across the grass and dirt, and a woman I recognize from TV weeps into her hands.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie Good is the author of What It Is and How to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections.

I got to tell you, what a computer thinks a man looks like, adversarially evolved hallucinations, is the kind of shit that wears me out. But, apparently, it isn’t the kind of shit that wears most other people out. Their focus is just too taken up with acquiring the essentials – liquor, guns, toilet paper, travel bottles of hand sanitizer – for them to ever notice the heart lying in rags at their feet, or the African monkeys rafting across the Atlantic, or the shrill, jangly sound in the background that can be variously translated as “hello” or “goodbye” or even “peace.”

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

Men on the street would call my girlfriend lindo. “Get used to it,” she said. I decided the best thing for me to do was nothing. April had been designated Artichoke Month. I remember we saw a movie about astronauts on a mind-bending journey to the cosmic womb. It was confusing and a little scary. She got really into the singer-songwriter who had committed suicide by stabbing himself in the chest. There were long lines outside liquor stores and gun shops. One day we found a hand-lettered cardboard sign lying abandoned on the sidewalk: Hungry & Cold / Anything Helps.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.