Howie Good

Academe (A Fable)

When deer invaded the Humanities Building, singly and in pairs, a chaos of white-tailed shadows, the university police (in bulletproof vests!) rushed to the roof to escape the vicious clatter of hooves, and all the deans and all their assistants screamed from the upper windows for the proper forms to be filled out, while down in my suddenly empty classroom, I could feel the shudder in the air of wolves breeding with campus dogs in dirty red bandanas, a nameless longing for something that doesn't exist.

Blues Progression

Ask anyone. Ask Dylan's one-eyed undertaker. Ask him about roses growing out of people's brains, alligators crawling through sewers, lovers turning into graveyard angels, souped-up cars running full blast on a Friday night, the so-called “old, weird America,” a haze of shadows drifting in the open window, where I move to the movements of the naked woman slip-sliding under me, our flesh, inside & out, zebra-striped at hundreds of miles per second.

Howie Good is the author of The Complete Absence of Twilight. Other forthcoming books include Fugitive Pieces and Buddha & Co.