Howie Good: "Gangster of Love", A Rain Of Bile And Blood, A Hulking Cosmic Bouncer, And Tennessee Williams On Seconal

Heart of Hearts

You know that saying “too mean to die”? Well, it’s not true. Dad is dying. I try to make myself feel appropriately sad, but a heart isn’t like a bud that unfolds on schedule. “Gangster of Love” is an old hit record by the Steve Miller Band. It’s also now a sort of job description. The work is more difficult than it sounds. When I walk, wherever I walk, my shadow walks ahead of me.

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The white police officer has too small a heart. How is that legal? the prosecutor asks. The wily old judge gestures that he can’t hear over the roar of the rain. Witnesses in the case exchange anxious glances across the courtroom. The defense attorney just smirks. A while later, a van taking away the jurors runs completely off the road. No one is even hurt, but angels are everywhere, joking and laughing and smelling like turned earth.

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It was soon raining again, scarlet and black, the drops alternating between blood and bile. Even the cows on the hillside wondered what the fuck. If you ever go searching for an answer, you’ll just end up disappointed and confused and alongside broken old farm machinery rusting in the weeds in an abandoned corner of the heartland.

Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity

The ground is littered with used paper face masks. I want to shake this person and that person and tell them, “You can’t be lost in your own world all the time.” But, of course, I won’t. A purplish darkness creeps over the city. I stream a movie about an international crew of astronauts on a journey to the cosmic womb. The ship malfunctions. Their sanity frays. They slowly turn against one another. Something out there in space is acting like a hulking bouncer who won’t let them through. If they knew what I know, they would just chuckle. A month from now my daughter is having a daughter.

R.I.P.

Tennessee Williams woke in the middle of the night groggy from two Seconals and reached for another on his bedside table, only to mistakenly pick up a plastic cap from a bottle of Murine eye drops, which got stuck in his throat. People have been crushed by falling masonry, burned alive with gasoline, run over in the street. But choking to death on a bottle cap?! I don’t understand that kind of poetry.

 Howie Good is the author of more than two dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and The Bad News First (Kung Fu Treachery Press).  

James Diaz contemplates a god as a weapon in the mouth, a band-aid heart, and the shape you leave in the snow

Genesis As a Blur Seen from the Driver's Side Window

The girl was a cloud 

of moss 

over the missing eye of god

in a fire you know where the skin ends

and the bone begins

they gathered their stories in a bundle of heat

whip last and you feel it first 

this mountain of thirst tremble up

against the line of blue wall 

wrapped round a cloud of sound

say sky but not the how of it

it is here underneath the dire thing

all day they sing it like a broken tooth

drowning in milk - a god is a weapon in the mouth 

of everything 

we came crawling out of

speak to me of dark matter 

and I will show you 

where the blade 

of the beginning went in

and came out clean

up there they drew the line

but down here 

we just walked it.

The Time Of My Life

To be born

is to be ruined

so much more gets lost than found along the way

like a broken radio I kept my parts intact

even in silence

I waited for signal return

an unlikely kind of wild

like maybe forgiveness is always unearned

and whose hands were first to shatter me

also loved me and so on and so on

what is it, this thing in my band-aid heart 

telling me how to breathe like a bent arrow through luck-shot air

my god, kid, can you believe we made it this far

and you’d like to laugh it off

but no matter, it matters, you look a lot like them

your people, your kin, your kind

they went wild on you, ate you up,

my god, kid, don’t you know you had to come this way

along the riven path

that your bones were already lit and your blaze is beautiful.

Thousand Oaks 

you know who you are

by the shape on the wall

you know how to fall

into place, broken glass

memory shifter, your tired little body

flailing, failing 

it's your half light

it's the last call tonight

it's the wild wolf coming for you

ambulance lights

the shape you leave 

in the snow

one huge heft of human

wears you down, don't it

getting through 

getting by, slept it off one too many times

only putting down what you know

break and break and you're broken

after a while 

it's the only way 

the light you lay in 

hands to the floor, officer, I meant no harm

 

in the name of the father

i meant only laughter 

meant only the name i was given

sour in my mouth 

and here i am

take me in your shadow

i am dressed for the kill

i am dressed for the light.

 James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and All Things Beautiful Are Bent (forthcoming, Alien Buddha Press, 2021,) as well as the founding Editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their work has appeared most recently in Cobra Milk Mag, Bear Creek Gazette and Resurrection Mag. They live in a far too cold and snowy upstate New York, where they are waiting patiently for the Spring.