Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/zHDvQNnKEps) 31.10.2021.
Beatific
My father beat me when I fell and chipped a tooth,
my mother when I used our Black maid’s hairbrush.
“Someday you’ll thank me,” my mother said as I fought
back tears. Someday wasn’t today. Today my tongue
was too busy exploring the shimmery slit down there.
I can still taste you, the surprising saltiness of hallelujahs.
Dead Language
In the surviving fragment
of his book On Analogy,
Julius Caesar tells us to
“Avoid strange and un-
familiar words as a sailor
avoids rocks at sea,” which
sounds like sensible advice.
But even so, I’m not about
to take writing tips from
the man who started the fire
that in 48 B.C. destroyed the
Great Library of Alexandria.
To Those I’ve Wounded
What I didn’t do
I should’ve done,
and what I did do
I shouldn’t have,
and now I can’t
escape my own
history, a stench
like dead-flower
About the Author: Howie Good is the author most recently of the poetry collections Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press).
