Joseph K.
One evening he stopped on the sidewalk in front of the lighted display window of a little bookshop, his attention caught by the cover of a parody edition of the Kama Sutra called Kama Suture. If only he had the nerve to invest, there was a fortune to be made in ladies undergarments. But some people are born to juggle spinning plates on sticks and others to fill sandbags. Beneath his black derby, nothing was ever the way it is. He dutifully resumed his ridiculous search for an address he had been given that didn’t exist.
Talk Talk
The adults in the deep section of the pool were loudly debating who has the best sandwiches, Subway or Jersey Mike’s. I was half-asleep on a lounge chair, but thinking, Whoever it is, the existential issues remain essentially unchanged. A passing seagull may any moment shit on my shirt or your freshly washed hair. Night retained the stifling heat of day. The name they give you when you’re born you become—in my case, a cancerous sadness. Out on our back deck, I listen without judging to the intimate conversations of the gregarious insects at ease in the dark.
The Unbearable Pain of Being
“Your call is important to us,” a computer-generated female voice smoothly lies. Only an hour after waking, I’m falling asleep at my work desk from the pain med that the doctor I’m phoning prescribed. And the big yellow capsules haven’t even dampened the pain that is like a burning spear buried in my side. The last time I saw you you said, “Stay strong.” Well, I haven’t. The unbearable pain of being continues to spread and spread. Yesterday a sculpture of the Virgin Mary in Linz, Austria, appeared to be in the throes of labor, to the stunned astonishment of museumgoers.
Seedtime
They say the earth will one day vomit up the dead. They say time is a loop, with no beginning and no end and no possible way of escape. They say a lot of scary things as we fumble about in the present without ever entirely leaving the past. Our children have their own children now, tiny, crawling figures who look doubtfully at me on FaceTime, as more or less a stranger. I have no such doubts about what awaits. My heart has split open like a seed pod, scattering here and there blue gold seeds, a near calamitous waste.
Howie Good is a writer and artist living on Cape Cod. His new book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.
Image: shutterstock.com
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Heavy Feather Review 