Howie Good

Chaos Theory

Life grew heavy with the weight of names. You were drunk all the time. The inmates fought their straitjackets and howled, their ages hard to guess. It was probably what you deserved for speaking ironically to people who couldn’t detect irony. When your shift ended, you started for home in a cold and depressing rain. On the way you wondered how it was that the clocks in your house never seemed to move, but that night fell regardless, a hangman’s black hood.

Cold War Babies

I woke up at three-thirty in morning from a dream in which I was standing on a white sand beach. In the dream a seagull attacked a head that had washed ashore. I was the only person paying any attention to the gull. Everyone else was either sunbathing or playing in the waves. That was the kind of world it was. I felt angry with myself because I couldn’t remember something. It may have been the term “Cold War babies.” For some reason the term seemed important to remember. The seagull continued to jab at the head, which now had no eyes. When I woke up, I realized that we hadn’t seen the sun in days.

Howie Good is the recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.
 
 
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