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Howard Good
Wasted
None of it had happened yet,
the murmur of monsters
in the cancer-riddled forest,
and we never suspected it would,
only 17, wasted that night
on Old Milwaukee and hash,
my hand down her pants
and our hearts like flooded engines,
pinwheeling stars plunging
into the sea with a steamy hiss.
After the War
The bullets will slip back
to sleep or flop around
like fish stranded on a dock.
The dead will chat with me
about their wounds, smiling
and nodding frequently,
and the wounds will grow
into tulips, necklaces, Burger Kings.
The sky will be impossibly blue,
the color of absolute quiet,
except along the bottom,
where it’ll be curled and crumbling
and screaming for its missing legs.
©2005 by Howard Good
Howard Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the
author of the poetry chapbook Death of the Frog Prince (FootHills Publishing,
2004). His poems have appeared in numerous journals and ezines.
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