Howie Good

Insomnia

I toss and turn beside my wife, who hardly stirs, though she’s the one scheduled to have a tube inserted in a blood vessel in the arm or leg, a procedure that allows the doctor to see into her heart. God’s love is unreliable. A major heart valve might be leaking. Multiple arteries might be clogged. Her heart might be as beyond repair as our poor mismanaged planet. The wonder isn’t that I can’t sleep but that anyone can.

&

“Do you see the donut,” the cancer specialist asks, “or just the hole?” My eyes burn, though there’s only water in tears. Once cancer touches you, you belong to it, you’re marked with the herd brand. It would take something like a miracle for me to recover. Yesterday, to the shock of tourists, a statue of the Virgin Mary in a fourteenth-century cathedral in Linz appeared to go into labor. Belief is contagious. And so, I lie in bed at night with the windows open, listening intently to the gregarious insects at ease in the dark.

Home School

On the bedside table a glass eye soaks overnight in a glass of water. Dawn is trapped miles below and running out of air. A legless beggar on a board with wheels rolls over the cracked sidewalks of dreams. My morning stubble grows out the color of the reddish blood-rich velvet on antlers. It all makes a kind of sense. To see myself as I am is to remember myself as I was, a shyly smiling boy his parents crumpled up and his teachers threw away.

&

My ancestors, forced throughout the Middle Ages to wear pointed hats and yellow badges, became easy-to-spot targets for slurs or slaughter. And now? I’m more than just normally tired. I was born with a hole in me and so went searching for a way to fill it. A dream I had the other night revealed what it’s like for the frozen embryos that never became babies. “Why would you do this to us?” they scold. And even worse were the cries of the pregnant women gassed in the camps. Teaching a child to not step on a caterpillar helps get me where I’m going.

How It Is

“We didn’t know we were poor,” my mom used to say as if it were cause for boasting. She and my dad both grew up in the slums, the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. One hot summer day when my dad was just a kid, he wandered by the Hooverville that had sprung up at the Lower Manhattan side of the bridge. A man was shaving in the open air with a piece of broken glass. It was a strange and terrible sight, like watching a cruelly inventive medieval punishment carried out. Despite blood pouring from numerous cuts and gashes, the man went on scraping at the stubble on his torn face. My dad was incredulous. He hadn’t learned yet, he was in no position to recognize at his young age, that the world burns without flame.

Howie Good's latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.