Heartland
Companies are working on a way to transcribe the musical tinkling of wind chimes into words. I only ever met one other person who had the same wedding song I had, and he was odd. Physical suffering brings its own bewilderment. Why me? you think through a haze of pain. Why not a small town in Iowa? Sometimes the pain feels like someone is repeatedly stabbing me in the side, but other times like he’s using a dull knife to skin me. The doctors disagree as to whether it’s a delayed side effect of my month and a half of daily radiation. Everything that exists has a past, a history. I see snow on the far-off mountains.
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Jennie Wade
You were twenty when you were killed while rolling out dough for bread in your sister’s kitchen, the only civilian to die at the Battle of Gettysburg. The one surviving photo of you shows a young woman wearing a lace-collared frock buttoned to the throat and with her lips primly pressed together and her hair bound up in a bun, in keeping with the virginal middle-class fashions of the day. They found the stray bullet in your corset.
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The Marsh
A bluejay calls at our back porch, bowing with extreme courtesy when I appear at the sliding glass door. Why count on Jesus? Why pretend to listen to the useless advice of friends? All I can think about are cancer and death. I am the Soviet Empire on the brink of collapse. Where there was once a relatable past, there are now cross-outs and erasures, puzzling traces of a monstrous upheaval. With a squawk, the bluejay flies off over the marsh. Whether the sky is blue or the sky is gray, the marsh is always many shades of green and with birds gaily crisscrossing it as if in expectation of imminent escape.
Howie Good is the author of The Dark, a poetry collection forthcoming from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.
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