Howie Good
The Death Row Shuffle
He said to me, “I am dying.” I said, “How is that my fault?” but sat down on the bed and held him and rocked him. Somewhere out there the lake was being strangled. I was frightened the fish would die, and that this would instigate the death row shuffle for everyone. The sound of endless wars in far-off places is still buzzing in my head. I stop, I look. The boy and the car are gone. It’s just crying and anger here, and farmers who make less than a dollar a day having an arm or leg blown off.
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You open your eyes. The walls are covered in scribbled physics equations. You feel in the wrong just being there. Everything happens too fast, as if hurled in irrational anger by the hand of God, though it’s really fluid dynamics. You ask for pen and paper, but are given a slice of bread. I can’t explain it. I would need to Google you to find out.
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Our 5-year-old daughter, Celeste, was singing to herself. She suddenly stopped and said, “Why do I always fart when I sing?” Then a French farmer while plowing on a hill uncovered a rusted revolver that may be the very one Van Gogh used to shoot himself. I looked at my wife, who was looking back at me. I can’t keep drowning, I can’t. There are little children living without parents in freezing tents in detention camps. The ancient Greek stoics maintain a complicit silence. I just want it to end. Every kind of music is meant to be played loudly.
Howie Good is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems (Cajun Mutt Press, 2019). He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.
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