Snow
White Punishment
The poison apple goes a long way, / to a
museum of manual labor / rife in truncated limbs & torsos, / the
seven dwarfs jammed against the wall / & subtly touched all over / by a
small piece of fire, / every pure yet lifeless wish / mirroring a handmade
loss, / a shallow, dead-end space, / the
insistence on stillness & quiet, /
& later an anthropologist of his own childhood, / safe
& asleep in bed, / hanging from a
noose / his father installed.
Track
33
The train rocks from side to side as it
gathers speed. Something about the small, fidgety woman sitting across the
aisle from me recalls my dead mother. Philosophers used to argue that the soul
is like a pair of horses, one dark and one light, harnessed to the same heavy
wagon, each pulling in its own direction. My mother has been dead a full 10
years now. If you ask me, the soul is more like crushed stained-glass mixed
with sleep and kitty litter and loaded on an obscure artist’s horsehair
paintbrush.
‘The
Heart Is Not a Metaphor’
It’s kind of hovering, like a figure on a
cross,
a headless male torso, water sprouting
from his nipples,
with you in front of it, twisted into an
X.
That’s who I want to stand in front, you,
not me,
waterfalls versus boxes of rat
poison,
while empty space slants precariously,
an ivory satin bridal gown where there was
none.
NB: A collage based on
Roberta Smith, “Reality Skewed and Skewered (Gushing, Too),”New York Times,
Oct. 2, 2014
Howie Good's latest book of poetry is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014), from MadHat Press.
