Poetry Issue 1
Howie Good
Space for Rent
I love you, America, your big sunglasses,
your grisly experiments with dogs,
the silence of your empty offices at night,
your trees like the bars on windows.
I love your unguarded coughs, too,
your presumption in naming babies
for cities all over the world.
Oh, I love you, America,
and your half-smile, half-smirk
when I say it.
Recalculating Route
We go where the voice tells us,
where noon shows off
its new death’s head tattoo
and the fat girl prevails
over words that wound,
where the wind sounds
like the wild talk of alarmists
and schoolchildren are grateful
for the narrow windows set in stone,
and if the voice says exit, we exit,
and if it doesn’t, we don’t,
our route conjectured on the screen
and hectically glowing
while the roads we must take
crisscross the dark.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 18 print and digital poetry chapbooks and the full-length collection of poetry, Lovesick (2009). His second full-length collection, Heart With a Dirty Windshield, will be published by BeWrite Books.
