Memoir in Blue
I was barely out of my teens. People would ask me if fentanyl came only in powder form. I had had that kind of childhood. At various points during the conversation, I would cup my hand behind an ear to make myself look older.
&
Never a hero of the ruling bloc, I had fallen completely out of favor because of my jokey manner. Agents spread a rumor that I had a loathsome and contagious disease. I kept to forested areas. If only I could forget what I saw, burned vehicles on highways and oozing bodies in open pits.
&
I took consolation in beer and Ativan and a woman with long, sensitive fingers who could read my scars like braille. Early one morning she was shaking me and saying, “Hey, wake up, wake up,” and it was just in time to see a dead branch that was protruding from a tree produce fierce, heart-shaped, audacious leaves.
A Conversation About a Conversation
My 96-year-old father asked if he had ever been married. He couldn’t remember. When my brother told him, he asked what had happened to his wife. My brother was describing all this to me on the phone. I was looking out the sliding glass door at the marsh. As usual, it was a windswept day on the Cape. The long, reedy marsh grass swayed like dancers in a sacred ceremony of some kind. My brother was saying just how sad the whole things was. Yeah, I said. We talked about the Mets before we hung up.
Atmosphere
Imagine eerie discordant music. Imagine being an underling of a notorious Russian arms dealer nicknamed the “Merchant of Death.” Imagine rain falling sideways. Imagine a city dissolving in the dark and the rain like the memory of a memory. Imagine the echo of footsteps behind you. Imagine housefronts pulsing faintly. Imagine the Merchant of Death having a girlish giggle. Imagine an eyeball with cracks. Imagine every blank white sheet of paper is a secret prison. Imagine no one who tries can log on to the system. Imagine the system has been pieced together from a broken shadow. Imagine there are billions of lights shining without it ever actually becoming bright.
Howie Good's latest poetry books are The Horse Were Beautiful, available from Grey Book Press, and Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems from Redhawk Publications.