If You Want a
Wolf, Get a Dog
Bright Stupid Confetti
Your body’s trembling. And then the music takes over. How did that happen? Everybody is very worried. It's not the same as a normal night of sleep. Look up there. There appears to be exactly one person standing under an open black umbrella. That’s not quite what I want.
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The Whole Goddamn Thing
I put things here and I look at them for a long time and if they don’t belong, well, they’ll get up and walk. It’s surprisingly easy to get lost. I regret that in some ways, and in other ways I don’t, and that’s the conundrum of all this. Usually there’s history – a note or message to someone. They don’t want to turn off the information, ever. If you stop at a red light, they will shout at you and say, ‘Do you think you are in Europe?’ I didn’t believe my friends when they first told me. Now I see flames behaving in ways no one had thought possible. Will there always be a guard box with a soldier with a rifle on his shoulder? You must change your life. At least that’s the advice I got. There’s nowhere in the country you can say this place is better than another. I don’t even know if they’d let people like me in. The scarecrow too has to wear this yellow star.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of The Loser’s Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize for Poetry from Thoughtcrime Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.