Black Hole
Chinese food deliveryman beaten, shot in $5 Brooklyn robbery pops up in a corner of my computer, the kind of tawdry headline I routinely wrote on the copy desk at the Herald, where I first learned that what is easy to read in 42-point type, Disgraced NY Congressman resigns, is hard to write, my nervy younger self scratching together on deadline the few words that could possibly convey the latest news in a single glance, Girl, 11, survives shooting by playing dead, the poem that had always been there but never seen.
Yes, Dr. No
After a preliminary exam, the eye doctor tells me to go sit in the waiting area while “the laser heats up,” and for an instant, I’m not at the clinic on West Main or an anxious 70-year-old who has suddenly lost most of the vision in his left eye. I’m back in 1962. Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No is tied spreadeagle on a steel table, a laser weapon like a sci-fi Sword of Damocles poised above him. But even as the fiery red laser beam that cuts through metal creeps closer and closer and closer to his balls, he banters with the archvillain. Shortly it’ll be my turn, and with the laser scorching the back of my eye, I’ll whimper and writhe in the exam chair and discover the doubtful utility of his example of behaving courageously under make-believe circumstances.
After Magritte
A golden-haired woman is stretched out naked on the couch. Her throat has been cut. Blood from the gaping wound has leaked through the couch cushions and formed a puddle on the floor. A man in his mid- to late thirties, respectably dressed in a black suit, stands at a Victrola credenza, his back to the corpse. His blandly handsome face is expressionless as he watches as if mesmerized a recording by Caruso spin on the turntable. Unbeknownst to him, detectives, armed with nets and clubs, have taken up positions outside his door. The tension is palpable. Their faces are identical to his.
Howie Good is a poet and collage artist on Cape Cod.