five poems
by Howie Good
Talking Cancer Blues
It’s custom to ring a bell at the completion of radiation treatment. I rang it two years ago, officially becoming a cancer survivor. Except survival doesn’t mean “cure.” The body’s cells, the very things that physically constitute you, remain suspect and must be monitored, their long-term loyalty open to question. On the first Monday of every month I attend a cancer support group with about a dozen other men, some struggling with the malicious side effects of radiation or chemo, others with a kind of PTSD. We represent an impressive array of cancers: prostate cancer, colon cancer, anal cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, bone cancer. One man recounts an episode of shitting blood. Another mumbles about his medication-induced sexual impotence. A third looks around the table with red-rimmed eyes as he bemoans his chronic insomnia. I’m overcome with shame. My complaint is existential. I’m haunted by the fear – more than fear, the expectation – of my cancer recurring. All it would take is one deranged cell to trigger the disease process. People who talk about “beating cancer” never had it. You don’t “beat” cancer. Even if you survive it, you don’t escape it. Not every prison requires guard towers and high walls.
Yeshiva Bocher
Watching from the window the reeds sway, I remembered the old Jews with long gray beards and curly sidelocks davening in the gloom of the decrepit synagogue. I was whatever age you are when you start school, a chubby little kid lost inside a maze of archaic laws. There were Hebrew lessons in the morning for only us boys, and regular lessons in the afternoon for boys and girls together. I developed a severe crush. Her name was Helen Hamburger. It’s so long ago now that her face is a blur, but I haven’t forgotten the confused feelings she aroused: tenderness, fear, joy, embarrassment. A plague of angels.
’60s Gold
I’ve lost interest in government and politics, an age-related development, like listening to ’60s Gold on Sirius XM. Whenever I hear CSN’s “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” it’s a sunny afternoon, the end of our senior year of high school. We’re squeezed into the back of Neal’s little black sportscar, the top down, sunshine and wind whipping in our faces. Susan, in the front passenger seat and in charge of the radio, has a cast on her leg. Neal is driving and chatty, and I’m trying to focus on the song’s lyrics, which seem to me, an aspiring writer, infused with a highly poetic sensibility. You and I are just friends. It isn’t until the next spring, following the Kent State massacre, campus strikes, the Days of Rage, that we declare our love. The rest is anybody’s biography.
Ominous Music
Once cancer touches you, you’re branded, you belong to it. Each day seems to bring new tortures and humiliations, a hit-and-run raid across your body’s collapsing borders. Inside you, it’s cold, a black void, just one more inconvenience of having been born. I myself graduated from a school named for a murdered president and whose teachers took away our individuality and substituted canisters of decaying film. Ominous music continues. Happiness, meanwhile, is wanting what you have, unpolished shoes with worn-down heels.
Postcolonial Melancholia
We toured the island in a hired van. We all chipped in to pay for it. I chipped in the least. The driver said his name was Jude. His eyes were hidden behind very dark glasses. Although a popular stop for cruise ships, the island was distressingly poor and ramshackle. The native born are descendants of slaves brought from Africa to mine salt. When you carry around a cell phone, you’re carrying around pieces of Africa. It’s there the metals used in phones are mined (often by children). That morning the only whites in sight were other tourists. Jude drove frustratingly slow due to the condition of the roads, in permanent disrepair from hurricanes and floods. The melancholy legacy of colonialism was discernible without any digging. A young man with the face and physique of a catalog model sold bananas individually by the roadside. An old grandma dozed on a plastic lawn chair in the dirt yard of a shack. Malnourished goats wandered the capital on spindly legs. There were no dogs that I could see. I just presumed dogs got eaten.
Photo fo Howie Good
BIO: Howie Good is a widely published but little-known author.