I jumped down off the tailgate with a box of religious ornaments and landed awkwardly. The elevator carried me to a vast gray room where others who were also broken in some way waited. I didn’t know anyone’s name, but there was a special desk just for children. A man whose face hadn’t ever quite healed used the back of his hand to wipe the dribble from his chin. I thought about the Age of Invention, why it was called that and this wasn’t. In the corner heart-shaped leaves continuously fell because someone had once forgotten to return.
THE NEW GRAMMAR
I bomb the house,
and by morning,
the corpses of black ants
spangle the floor
like a dozen misplaced commas
in the breathless
run-on sentence of spring.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of eight poetry chapbooks, including Tomorrowland (2008) from Achilles Chapbooks and Love Is a UFO (2009) from Pudding House. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of the Net anthology.
Read more work from Howie Good.
