All That Was Lost Is Returned
by Howie Good

The TV was broken, but my father kept turning the dial. There was something he wanted to watch that night. At the kitchen table my mother was drawing in her eyebrows. Children I knew from school lurched down the road in the front of our house with suitcases held together by rope. It wasn’t dark, and then it was, and the flames swayed despite the lack of wind. The poet gestured to me to follow him over the high railing of the bridge. I looked around for help. A woman stood on the corner with her hip thrust out. Six years passed in a minute. Such things are true if you believe them.

 

 

To a Literary Suicide

You go over the railing,

following the black thread

 

embedded in the map

you were given

 

back at the start,

the wings of bat-faced angels

 

slashing the clouds

now that you’re falling

 

and such light

as you can make out

 

suddenly like the first few

yellow leaves on a tree.

 

HOWIE GOOD, a journalism professor at the State University of New York, is the author of 11 poetry chapbooks, including Police and Questions (2008) and Still Like with Firearms (2009) from Right Hand Pointing, Tomorrowland (2008) from Achilles Chapbooks, Visiting the Dead (2009) from Flutter Press, and My Heart Draws a Rough Map (2009) from The Blue Hour Press. He has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize and four times for the Best of the Net anthology. His first full-length book of poetry, Lovesick, was released in 2009 by Press Americana.

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