three poems
by Howie Good
Superstitious
A man walks into Waffle House at 3 a.m. naked from the waist down. If, as the superstition holds, it’s bad luck to step on a sidewalk crack, he must have stepped on quite a few. We are living in a period of uncommon stress. Every time I think they have shut the siren off, it sounds again: some new person has been shot in the face or has fallen from a ladder and been impaled on a piece of rebar. Cover your Webcam with tape. You aren’t invisible. The black dots in the distance may be evil angels on the wing, and it’s still only the afternoon.
Work, for the Night Is Coming
Big, round bumblebees moved from flower to flower. Birds supplied fragments of song. Despite clear skies, the man on the grassy knoll carried an umbrella. I couldn’t recall the alias he was using when we last met. Frankly, I had been focused for weeks on trying not to die. A mysterious new disease was floating about, hunger without a mouth. Corpses were burned; souls shipped frozen. The man raised his umbrella, as in a prearranged signal to a shooter in a distant window. And the birds went on singing until just before dark.
Erik with a K
My doctors recommended further surgery, followed by quick burial. When I expressed a natural reluctance, they threatened revenge, the hag who murders babies in the womb and then clings to the souls of the mothers and talks through their mouths. Within minutes, the wind was hurling spears, rocking trees, toppling cradles. It was time for a change of scenery. As I steered my car through streets of blackened ruins, Erik Satie’s last words for some reason echoed in my head: “Ah! The cows. . .” I instantly saw them in front of me, massive, moon-eyed beasts behind wire fencing walking with a melancholy sway to a secret enigmatic music.
Photo of Howie Good
BIO: Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose poetry collections include The Dark and Akimbo, available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher. Sacred Parasite is scheduled to publish his newest collection, True Crime, in early 2026.