Selected Poems | Howie Good

What a Bad Week for the NRA

Let them go ahead and put
all four years of college online
or a row of Port-a-Potties
on a Civil War battlefield.

I don’t care if it’s sacrilegious.
Morning is still morning
the next morning, just as when
we were kids and did it

for the first time, or maybe
the second, fumblingly,

under the small black moon
of the NRA sticker on the back window
of your dad’s Plymouth.

Darwin’s Ghosts

The woods seem
peculiarly dark
even during the day,

and the hikers
who chance it
tend in the end
to exhibit more zeal
than acumen,

but listen close
when the wind blows
of an evening,

and you can hear
what sounds to some
like a 4-year-old
with a stutter
dropping the F-bomb

and to some
like early humans
climbing down
out of the trees.

Howie Good’s latest poetry collection is Dark Specks in a Blue Sky from Another New Calligraphy. He is recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his forthcoming collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements.