Connotations of Ancestral Home
I felt like I was on a bridge, and there were two or three heavy trucks, and the bridge was rocking. Even the dairy cows wondered what the fuck. We knew the magician didn’t actually make the card disappear, but where did it go? At one point we seemed to be following Beethoven’s footsteps through Vienna. This was someone’s idea of paradise. It just wasn’t mine. I wore only a sports jacket and shoes, no shirt or pants. The local women said that when the time came, they wanted to be buried in their wedding dresses. They would tell us many other strange things while machine guns swept the streets.
The Day’s Residue
There were more mass shootings in 2019 than there were days in the year. That’s just the kind of place this is, mostly navigable in daylight, but, after dark, a whole other thing. “What are those bonfires?” I asked the migrants working side by side in the fields. They were like “Yes, yes, yes.” I’m just now finding my way. Meanwhile, Marlene is resting at home with a beer and the dude that shot her whose nickname is Rabbit. It has nothing to do with forgiveness. It’s simply that one person in six has never heard of the Holocaust. Freud said dreams are the day’s residue. I think of it sometimes when I see Nazis marching into Poland on the History Channel.
Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.