Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, winner of the 2017 Lorien Prize from Thoughtcrime Press, and Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry.
***1. Standard Deviation
I was only 15, running an errand for my
parents when two men in uniform grabbed me by the arms and dragged me away.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked them, and their answer was to hit me with a
helmet in the face. It turned from a beautiful place into a hell. People
managed to rescue the rabbits and goats before the fire took hold. I’m not
interested in the phenomenon of false memories, I’m interested in now. A tall
guy, taller than me, is carrying a giant thing, a very strange-looking thing
with antennas coming off it. The injured scream out, “I need some help, I need
some help.” My hair smells like the smoke of burning Confederate flags. I just
keep smiling. It makes you cry to walk up the stairs to see that.
***2. A Short History of Office Politics
I was inside with seven girls, and we were
starving. We didn't know the war had ended. A soldier came in and told us to
run. His turban wasn’t on his head. His clothes were torn. I saw shreds of
flesh dropping from his back. The whole city was burning. Staff had been
evacuated amid rumors that a tiger was on the loose. Every six months or so
you'll see something like that, where someone has been shot in the head with an
arrow, or falls off a ladder and lands on a piece of rebar. It just adds to the
chaos. Frankly, I’ve been trying not to die. When I come to work in the
morning, the first thing I do is recite some lines of verse. Then I weep, and
then I go to my office.
***3. Life Imitates TV
I heard the cries of “Attack! Attack!” You
could feel the ground shake. “Oh shit!” someone said. “This is it.” The whole
area was bright. I was feeling that boom till the morning. They arrived at
night. We said hello and shook hands with them. I wasn’t thinking of anything.
I just did it. Hence the bad weather, the hunger, the kids dying in the
countryside. Every time we thought we had shut the siren off, it sounded again.
We were all in shock and those who could lie on the floor did so. The rest find
mass graves. They witness executions. I mean that's warfare – it's clear and
simple, and it's in HDTV. I have explained this time and time again, but you
won’t listen. And now that room is on fire. If I turn there, it's there – it's
everywhere.
***4. Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day
We’re living in a preposterous age. Are we
going to have to pay a ransom to get out? We’re all being extra careful. You
may be in such a hurry that you don’t heed the clear warning. Go walk around
the plaza. The monsters were there before the superheroes. They shaved their
beards to look like us. Let’s stop with the flowery euphemisms. If you look
down the alley, you’ll see all kinds of things: people dumping trash, and
pissing, and shooting up, and dealing drugs. A man has a blanket over his head.
Some sturdy guys back there are helping hold him down. On its face, it’s
extremely suspicious. When I first saw it, I had this huge anxious feeling and
broke down in tears. Nothing is safe anymore. Cover your Webcam with tape. You
aren’t invisible.