Poetry Super Highway

Poetry Super Highway

August 2-8, 2010: Howie Good and Nick Petrone

Howie Good
goodh@newpaltz.edu

 

Bio (auto)

Howie Good (Highland, New York) is the author of 21 print and digital poetry chapbooks and a full-length collection, Lovesick, published by Press Americana.

The following work is Copyright © 2010, and owned by Howie Good and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.


Fable

A messenger arrived
from a country

colonized by magpies I have two sons, he said,

one whose name
means wolf,

one whose name
means laughter.

It felt like rain,
what’s called

a baby’s ear moon,
false angel wing.

They hanged him
in a cornfield.

The world is made
of tiny struggling things.


Rumble Strip

1
You’re gathering the baby’s things, disturbed all day by
your previous night’s dream You remember someone pursuing
you down crooked streets You wish you could remember who You ask a relative stranger what it means Start from the
premise that everything is broken.

2
Alone with your thoughts, open windows can be hazardous Orphaned parents dozing in wheelchairs along the boardwalk
turn like sunflowers to face the sun, the silence at fault
and the remaining light oppressed by the presence of what
can’t be mended.

3
The hammer falls on an empty chamber, the lethal injection
misses the vein Nothing comes easy after dark Although
the body heals, memory never recovers Pieces of the
gallows sold for a dollar a pound Until we know why, we
won’t know what happened The man in the window insists
that truth is a moving target The bird on his chest is
bleeding, too

 

_______________________________

Nick Petrone
nickpetrone13@hotmail.com

 

Bio (auto)

Nick Petrone is a an American history teacher and professor in Syracuse, NY The themes that appear most often in his poems are his children, the extraordinary nature of the mundane and the ephemeral nature of life He is currently working to publish a manuscript for a fictional novel entitled Bong Hits for Nietzsche along with developing historical and pedagogical theories for future publication

The following work is Copyright © 2010, and owned by Nick Petrone and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

An Ode to Eric, I Think”

Ordinary life –
a Gregory Corso connection
– I thought I saw Eric at a rest stop
on the New York State Thruway that same day my son had his surgery

it might have been him for all I know
.I never saw him lifeless –
 .believe in his death
 .like my mother believes in the Saints

he wasn’t my best friend
hell
had hardly known him long
.just a guy that roomed with my high school buddy near the South Campus
of a college I didn’t go to –

we used to listen to Dylan bootlegs,
drink the next-up-from-cheapest beer
(probably something Canadian)
all winter long
.and wonder
 .why we never got laid

wasn’t that much to my life
.not my wife giving birth
 .not my boy in the back seat still loopy from the anesthesia
 .not a great teacher who made me a poet or a bum

but when you travel cross-country with a guy,
.row a boat somebody left
 .near a lake in Kansas
with a tennis racquet
& a bottle of harsh Whiskey till that puddle in the center of the continent is all there is
 & the reeds
 & the radio

and the radio is running out of batteries
melting The Who
.but the moon is whiskey-warmed,
 .no one is almost out of cigarettes surprisingly
 .and what the fuck are you doing in a lake in Kansas

-it killed Eric to play citizen I think

or else that fall from grace
.a drunken night
 .just a few years later

Extraordinary life
a Gregory Corso connection
I thought I saw Eric
holding hands with a woman
as they passed the sunglasses stand.

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