Sunday, September 27, 2009

ABOVE US, PLANES LIKE SILVER CRUCIFIXES

by Howie Good


Darkening streets.
Impossible to avoid

the scurrying figures
huddled in their ratty coats.

Some live in the cabs
of the big machines,

others in the jagged hole
the machines were digging

before the work was abandoned.
A dog on a chain smiles fiercely

at me with discolored teeth.
Voices whisper in the hall outside

my door when I try to think.
Later, I’ll stand on the porch

with my hand on the dog’s head
and watch as the bombs approach

through the familiar mist
of the customary painkillers.


Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of ten poetry chapbooks, including Visiting the Dead (2009) from Flutter Press. His first full-length collection of poetry, Lovesick, has just been published by Press Americana.
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