Fable of the Wolf
The man in an oversized overcoat was looking for the street of winos. It was raining again, the scarlet and black soundtrack from an imagined movie. He lowered his eyes whenever he encountered clothes sprinkled with blood and mens’ brains. Carrying a duct-taped guitar case, he struggled through the barbed wire. He later told his diary that a big gray timber wolf answered the door smiling.
Triptych
1
It’s really all about light, you said. An empty boat floated down the slow, black river. Only moments before, we had entered a video store no one goes to anymore.
2
Police threw a cordon around the building. The sun hesitated. You lay down in the hall, hastily fitting yourself into the chalk outline of the victim’s body.
3
The sun had set, a disheveled orphan missing some teeth, the faint smell of shit on his hands, and in an inside pocket the varnished beads from a broken rosary.
The Anniversary of Endless War
I could sense thieves and shipwrecked sailors massing in the woods, crows preparing to feast on the precocious body of a teenage bride, the fairgrounds pockmarked with freshly dug rifle pits, our moon, a round prison hat, tilted at a jaunty angle for the dance of the three-legged stool.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Cryptic Endearments from Knives Forks & Spoons Press. He has had numerous chapbooks, including A Special Gun for Elephant Hunting from Dog on a Chain Press, Strange Roads from Puddles of Sky Press, and Death of Me from Pig Ear Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology. He blogs at http://apocalypsemambo.blogspot.com.
Steel Toe Review 