1
Somewhere there’s a class picture of me smiling stupidly from the back row. My teacher, Miss Mapes, has a face like a telegram crumpled in anger. It’s been a long time since I thought about fifth grade or evictions or sheriff’s sales. The road just ends. I enter a house with covered mirrors, buttercups brightening the curtains.
2
One had a dangerously fast heartbeat. The police knocked one down. One was mathematically eliminated – what you get, I suppose, for asking who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. One tilted like a helicopter at takeoff. My dead. There have been years I haven’t been able to visit you. There are days like this when that’s all I do.
Howie Good a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently Love Dagger from Right Hand Pointing.