Ramshackle Review

Howie Good:

Two Poems 

EVERYTHING AFTER THAT

1
There were many empty chairs. There would be even more. The damned were being led through a treeless garden of a thousand sad thoughts. Children and spastics scattered in fright. A little gentleman in a bowler hat searched his pockets for the paragraph he had torn from the newspaper. The murderer, face lit by a gas lamp, whispered, “There’s so much left to do.”

2
Spring had arrived early, then coffins, each covered with a soldier’s greatcoat. The murderer took flight. People crossed the street on their hands and knees.

3
The flowers were hardly open when the rain killed them, the roses, poor roses, ten ragged musicians in distress worrying about what would happen if a cat sat on a baby’s face as it slept.

PASTELS 

1
Angels in pink silk shoes decorated with rosebuds wandered through the rooms. It was the house of a hanged man. The cat made every effort to appear elegantly bored.

2
A wheelbarrow of weathered skulls stood off to the side, white in the morning, lilac during the day, orange in the evening.

3
The muse was in the woods. She had handed me over to the firing squad. A blond light pervaded as softly as a piano playing.





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).