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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