Howie Good Returns With Invisible Powers, The Titanic Shipyard, And Bonfire-Sized Roses

 In Lieu of Flowers

I told the doctors flat out, “Cure me or kill me,” only to be strapped down like the ladder on the roof of the white work van, but not before I managed to channel the zealotry of a martyr an declare every day should be a mental health day, something that was feeling suddenly necessary now that a first cousin about my age had died from an overdose, an unsuspected heart condition, invisibility, if the invisible is defined as “what light cannot illuminate,” or just so much sadness.

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My dad tried to kill himself three times. Well, four if you count the time he fell asleep smoking in bed and woke up with the mattress on fire. That country no longer exists. I remember because I arrived on a ship built in the same shipyard as the Titanic. Others who came from faraway don’t want to believe their own memories. Each night the moon grows darker. The family dog wails like a soul in hell demented by unbearable pain. A lot of things happen that just kind of happen; for example, the human skulls on sale on Etsy.

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I was born in the rain and the dark – a vague but sinister omen. Almost immediately, familiar words were given unfamiliar meanings; familiar objects, unfamiliar names. I grew up surrounded on three sides by ghosts imprisoned behind barbed wire. Today’s rain falls on yesterday. A 100-year-old former concentration camp guard has been arrested in Bavaria on 3,518 counts of being an accessory to murder. Up, you corpses! Get up! Wounds heal from the inside out. It’s only a matter of weeks perhaps before there are wild roses the size of bonfires.

Howie Good is the author of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is the co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022