Thoughts and Prayers

Small furry animals have crawled out of their holes for a look. Such sights! Smashed-in skulls and severed feet and angels covered in blood. Like a nasty drunk, God has been exceptionally belligerent of late. A cadaverous woman in blue scrubs who says her name is April asks, “On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being the lowest, how severe is your pain?” Strangers on social media offer thoughts and prayers. Even then, the leaves on trees instantly wither as a burning airship passes overhead. My wife refuses a ride. We cling together just like the words in a poem.

The Sadness Will Last Forever

I was scarecrow thin and often cold and trembly. When I went out in my black beret and belted black raincoat, I might easily have been mistaken for an amateur spy. I would watch with mounting anxiety as the woods filled up with snow or the horizon burned from one end to the other. For years, my condition remained undiagnosed. But just because it now has a name doesn’t mean there is a proven treatment. A physician in rural Massachusetts has failed once again in his attempt to photograph the soul leaving the body at the moment of death. 

Sunday Bloody Sunday

A gun goes off. I lie there on the carpet, more and more convinced that something is wrong with my breathing. It’s only then that I realize I should have listened when they discouraged me from using semicolons. On this particular Sunday, the music returns, like an angel with wings made entirely of eyes. Pope Francis declares from his window in St. Peter’s Square, “Don’t be afraid of tattoos.” Ha! I know what it’s like to live under the tyranny of bodily pain, forced to endure its cruel and arbitrary edicts, and no one to prevent allegorical statues of Dawn and Dusk from being melted down for bullets.

Howie Good is the author of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is the co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest. It is scheduled for publication in summer 2022.

Space and Time

Perception of space
Folded within a corner
I see from the inside
You see in and outside

Observation of time
Outside the line
I see the short-side
You exist outside

Persistence of regret
In all my dark corners
Penitent from the inside
You erase it from memory

Lē‘ahi


 

Southside Oahu, littered with tuff cones:

Koko Head, labia minor,

Punchbowl, the hill of sacrifice,

Diamond Head, point of the ahi fish, all

grand promontories—extinct volcanic craters.

 

Rules and restriction translated to challenges,

saucer-shaped Diamond Head called me;

outside the renowned Fire Control Station,

its new and aged military facilities prohibited

all access to taxpaying civilians—daring infiltration.

 

Sneaking into the naturally fortified crater, eluding

camouflaged guards—real or imagined adversaries—

I stealthily advance; my body clothed in red trunks and tan skin,

blend into tropical surroundings, melt, into plentiful vegetation

encircling the cavity’s inner rim, entering the military mystery maze.

 

The apparent sound of bullets buzz by,

pierce the dense, dank, jungle undergrowth,

expose themselves as culex quinquefasciatus brown mosquitos

vicariously breeding in stagnate water—feasting

on a liquid banquet from my exposed legs and arms.

 

Damp, corroded chambers cut in the cavity resemble

Alcatraz cells: steel beds hanging from rusted chains,

ascend 560 feet from the floor past bunkers where

solid concrete walkways shift to a natural tuff

severe switchbacks negotiate the interior crater’s sheer slope.

 

The rugged trail morphs into steep, stone stairs through a

225-foot tunnel to a fortification that one directed artillery

fire from batteries beyond; reaching its pumice plateau,

approaching a mammoth navigational lighthouse,

I scan the Oahu’s sandy shoreline from Koko Head to Wai’anae.

 

Historical playground for humpback whales,

oblivious the area doubles as a coastal defense vista.

tropical trade winds brush my face, activating imagination

while the capacious, comforting, cacophony

of Kanaloa’s waves crash like rhythmic pahu far below.

 

**********************************************
 

Bing Thieves

 

Campbell fertility

fruit cannery pioneer

Santa Clara gem

I long for fruitful harvests

silicon wasteland reclaimed

 

Ripe cherry orchards decorated the valley

like Christmas Tree ornaments, round, red,

eye popping orbs drew visitor’s attention

away from migrant farm worker camps

or miserable wooden boxes—an excuse

for a home—enjoyed by a cheerful few.

 

And yes, these orchards offered adventure,

growers aimed two barrels, shot rock salt

in our butts as we ran from their groves,

buckets full, bandito mystique undeniable,

dire warnings from our parents

school authorities—all elders ignored.

 

Best times never knew the worst yet to come

as stainless-steel chains uprooted tree trunks

tar and concrete smothered fertile fields,

and children grew up dodging street traffic

gathering in malls, frequenting cyber cafés—never

swaggering, searching, pilfering full-grown fruit…

 

**********************************************
 


Cracks of Light

 

Our empty hearts     once filled

with unflinching     alacrity,

agitated overnight     we stood

by oil radiators    metal accordions;

cast iron dragons     as discolored

as seasoned     crêpe pans

heated our     hands while we

embraced     common sense

depression;      huddled together

like snowed-in     hostages

sharing their     communal discomfort

in sweaty     submission,

our restless     blues cut through

a hauntingly     sober silence

like a machete     blade slicing

dense jungle      undergrowth

incessantly     screaming out

for social    emancipation

when      disunity and whimsy

displace     crude manners

dwarfing     responsibility:

lockdown     solidarity.

 

**********************************************



Tilt-a-Whirl Madness

 

Lock yourself down, hold on tight

you met the height challenge

cork shoe lifters shot you up

two inches & ruffled hair made

you appear gigantic, in control,

ready to spin like a stuntperson

make centrifugal force your own

gravitational pull your companion.

 

Fold brazen arms behind padded

lap bars, secure yourself & strangers

who ride sheet metal thrillers & share

danger’s safehouse; youthful mouths

missing teeth laugh & scream

like delighted children escaping

tides that grasp ankles as they

scamper from surf to dry sand.

 

Quartz lights flash perpetual chaos

in motion as the platform rotates,

seven swiveling cars test fortitude

resolve, & moxie, daring bold riders

like yourself to sidestep carnival sawdust

spread on the floor, eerie remains

of motion sickness for those out of sync

victimized by Tilt-a Whirl indifference.

 

 

**********************************************


Tipping Point Snapshot

 

Cars roll down the inner-city gullet

vehicle lights flashing as dawn’s early rays

part mist & unveil crosswalk shadows;

 

old school skyscrapers jut up towards heaven

protect flying rodents—portrait ready pigeons— 

that nest below stone-crafted window ledges—

 

scarlet scavenger eyes fixate on pedestrians below

looking for careless hands fingering croissants,

& street vendors dropping hot dogs & soft pretzels;           

 

drummers begin beating empty 5-gallon cans

under concrete bank porticos; audible rhythms echo

miles up and down Broadway, rebound off structures;

 

street singers & mimes soon join in the fray

destitute but happy, many homeless yet carefree,

hats & guitar cases welcome unlikely prospects

 

as the strip begins to buzz & people shuffle

in line for blocks awaiting Starbucks to open,

fuel & task soul-fed inspiration with caffeine;

 

meanwhile, escorts saunter home, recline

on their own beds—sleep uninterrupted. Restful.

Free of twilight visitations when overweight patrons

 

pin them with passion’s pretense allowing groans

to rise & fill voids like subway grate updrafts

decelerating wind as noisy as traffic horn banter

 

Manhattan minstrels, hucksters, & saints

approach tipping points, regain equilibrium,

& embrace yet another good morning’s night.

 

 

How everything turns away…
~ W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

to its small purpose, the plowman’s hands holding
reins and plow, the shepherd’s gaze upward
inventing stanzas for the month of June.
The lowlands are pasture, the terraces arable.
Stouter to the myth Breughel has seen
the far-away world of fate close to his world.
The local and contemporary eye
has pictured that as this in terms of home.
Green is the sea under a thawing sky
as unlike Greece as Shakespeare’s Rome and Rome.
A partridge clutches to a waking vine stock.
Columns accent the city far below
with its harbor awaiting the ship that may be expensive
and delicate, gliding on a stiff breeze.


 
Palirunus Marginatus

Not everything red is a lobster.
But the part of us fed to love
pried from our armor and prominent claws
is easily imagined all buttery succulence.
Instead it refuges further beneath the surface
in a different ocean without grammar,
spiny and recessed. It has shed its defenses
though remains distinctive with hair-tenuous
antennae precisely watchful enough
to sound us from its other side of the world.


 
With Seaweed

Dreams are dreams only—once woken from.
Everything ran slower in that sluggish
element where your hair floated freely
with the seaweed and love became a salty
buoyancy of smiles and stinging tears.

I was subsumed with the acorn barnacles,
sea vases and the translucent baskets
of Venus’ flowers, learning my sessility
under the hover of dead man’s fingers that clothed you,
a spiny carpet of urchins at the bottom of my feet.

There you were: Belief made you, in entries
of the log books of sailors from flooded
explorations, in your blended topos of history
and myth, topmost human yet by
our day’s thorough fathomings no more than tale

and so there I dreamed, dimly yet surely
aware of my natural shores, little by little
insisting I must breathe as speech
intoned beyond words to the single unbroken
high C beyond me in the pressure of my hearing.

 
Conch

I kept
turning away
to become
the staircase I climbed
from the bottom up
spiraled by the encompassing
element,
hoist
up my mast
for a Hindu ceremony’s
music of the spheres,
my door given way
to this riddle
of speaking mouthless
from an exterior
I unfolded at one with.

Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in journals including The Boston Globe, Everse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse, Ibbetson Street, The Concord Saunterer, and Poem. His second book, On Earth As It Is, will be out in early 2022 from Cervena Barva Press.

Ancestral Ideas

Early in our lineage the handy man,
Homo habilis, sees in his mind’s eye
a useful connection between his hand
and an egg-shaped basalt cobble milled
by a river’s turbulent current long ago.

He fits it to his hand and swiftly strikes
another stone which produces a flake,
a thin sharp-edged chopper or scraper
easily seen as a tool to cut trees or meat, 
to scrape bark or the hide of an animal.

Striding through tall grasses of the African
savanna in the bright sunlight, Homo erectus,
holds steady the image of his hunting fellows,
taking a grazing zebra bachelor by surprise,
by their combined effort like a pack of hyenas.

They circle around under shady acacia trees,
hearing casual snorts and the switching of tails;
a lame one flees too late and is killed with clubs.
A runner, having returned to camp, brings others
with handaxes, cleavers, and growling stomachs.

Tonight, around a cooking fire, they feast while
two babies fuss suckling their mothers’ breasts.
Not enough for them but more since siblings
died. One mother clicks her tongue; the other,
blows air on her infant’s face to bring on sleep.

Pinkish streaks at the horizon announce dawn.
Lanky men emit a sliding sound, eeeennaaaa.
Sleepy youngsters stir in the dust while women
search the ground for bones that their children
can break for marrow when they feel hungry.

Men slink down a slope to a muddy watering hole.
Birds burst upwards in fright. In the night a pig has
been killed while it drank. Would there be remains
for scavenging? Only a muddle of animal tracks are
found. The group will have to search elsewhere.

Into the hot sunshine this sweating group of
early humans find it pleasurable to lope over 
the wide savanna. To their minds no horizon 
is too far. They move toward the blue rise of
mountains in the distance, hoping to find caves.

Blue-colored horizons mean many days and
nights spent looking for carcasses. Savanna
grass gives way to scrub trees and succulents,
the latter becoming a reliable water source.
They meet other groups of roaming strangers.

Babies who fussed under acacia trees are now men.
Their deceased mothers left for predators or buried
in shallow soil. They carry memories of white-haired
Biftu who gave names to each in the small group to
organize them and enable members to communicate.

Succeeding this migrating group come others who
slip through horizon after horizon, over endless
surfaces, imagining what a difference a wooden
shaft would make fitted to a long sharp blade of flint.
Groups split apart, seeking alternative ways to live.

Homo sapiens emerges as intuitive, if not conscious,
aware of a companion’s motives and life’s potentials
around them. They thrive on the northern edge of the
African continent, adapting to variable environments,
learning from their experiences and positing “what if.”

By the seaside their outlook is flat and blue as sky.
They walk through a vegetal corridor and find a land
northward, not as luxuriant as the Ancestors had known.
Caves become dwelling sites, but here they encounter new
inhabitants who have moved from icy valleys in the north.

Stockier, with a heavier brow, Homo neanderthalensis
competes with the African immigrant for lynx and foxes,
pestered by jackals and hyenas. This singing cave dweller
of the Levant crafts small flint points with gripping fingers
and his sharp-edged burin carves on delicate bone or antler.

In open-air sites men design a core stone for specialty flakes.
Fishes, hippos, small cats and bears along with wild cattle are
butchered. Women look for bedding grasses, nuts and seeds. 
The two competing groups realize that combining their efforts
to live make sense so they begin to cooperate and interbreed.

When Elisav loses her daughter other women cry with her and
fold the child’s knees into her chest. A niche in a rock formation
is found in order that her closed eyes look toward the northwest.
As an intentional act of affection a red deer jawbone is placed
on the girl’s pelvis. That night mothers hold their children close.

Later, offerings of fallow deer antlers and wild boar mandibles
to the dead are incorporated into a simple ritual using words of
a rudimentary language. Competition arises when a neighboring
family shows deliberate intent to use the same burial ground. The
original group, claiming ownership, drives them away with stones.

With heads full of ideas and increasing physical skills, combined
groups, not liking a crowded landscape, disperse east and west
and proliferate along the way. Their progeny establish a variety of
races and cultural traditions. At long last successful groups beget
you and me and generations of space travelers seeking the moon.

Thus, humans evolved using an ancient cognitive toolkit that went:
I am preverbal. I am a figment embraced by imagination. I am the
moment of eureka. I am the prize of consciousness. I AM AN IDEA.

							

empty gift


last class before Break
a girl took a scrap 
of thick purple paper
trimmed it square,
folded it to a cube,
let fall a teardrop of glue,
snipped a strip of scarlet ribbon
and tied up the tiny box
with a frilly bow

Merry Christmas  she said

near twenty-years
of its fading on my bookshelf, 
I’ve admired the handiwork –
never tempted to open it
of course
because I watched it made
and know there’s nothing inside



shoelace

                       one end reaches too far from,
the other too near, the eye – a simple fix,
should be – but these shoes were my father’s
and I find he laced them with a trick
no doubt for better holding 
– so I just make one loop too large
          one too small
and rush out the door

slower is faster  he’d say
trying to show what worked
     what lasted
as I pulled away

     till his care couldn’t 
keep me close
and I became a loose end
               out there dangling
tripping up the unwary
and trodden upon in turn



snowman

     there he is again
in late moonlight 
this early morning –
was he there all night?

when he first showed up
     plump and smiling,
overturned basket
     a troubadour’s hat, 
stick arms raised,
    coal eyes glowing –
I didn’t have the heart to tell him
     wrong window,
the ice-princess has moved –
and next night there he was

     I let the joke go months too far:
his youth spent,
he’s sunk in on himself,
     a mere grey heap now,
head a twisted skull,
     hat just hanging,
one eye drifted south,
     face a fixed grimace,
          mouth one long cry,
     arms askew
as if he long forgot 
     what they were reaching for 
– oh, to call back the cold season
          that left him behind



hermit crab



     star by star 
          the moon steps back      
tugging away night’s blanket
     wave by wave
     
     he scuttles safe home
like a seabed bat
     by sunrise	

what does he do all day
     hidden like an answer
in the coiled question
     of his old snailshell –
     sleep and dream?  pray and plan?	
          tend his tender flesh?
while the sun’s giant feet
     tromp the sand
and seagulls wheel and jeer

Voyages

It all began on a sea-voyage to Egypt during my teenage,
where I fell in love with the Pharaohs and their ancient heritage,
with the eye of Ra and the ankh which their deities held,
with the pyramids,
that I even contemplated becoming an Egyptologist. 

Next came a flight to Algeria where most people only spoke French. 
My inability to communicate made me appreciate lingual skills,
thus an enhancement of the language brought me translation thrills
of Les Fleurs du Mal and other Baudelairean gems.
 
My own odyssey to Melbourne and Sydney was fraught with hardships.
I thought the status of an immigrant was nigh to that of an explorer like James Cook,
so in the valley of humiliation I learned what it is to be caught 
in the labyrinth of employment agencies and social benefits.

My journey through Caledonia was the most inspiring of all.
I became enamored with kilts, with tartans, with the bagpipe’s call,
with the Sun-Cross that dangled from my left-ear’s lobe,
with the Celtic twilight that permeated my academic work.
 
Middle Age

He dwelt on his receding hair,
the sluggish pace of a healing wound.
He monitored each wrinkle on his face,
camouflaged the fast-greying phase
with a reddish beard
and a trendy, golf headpiece.

We argued about our difference in age
to no avail,
and though my visage had borne no trace
of corrosive time
or the passage of numerous days,
I assured him that my heart was a sage
with the blows of events that do not discriminate
between the infant and the far advanced in years.

I sat and pondered over my ill-chosen mate.
I though maturity would come with the lapse of decades,
but that was not the case,
for our love began to crumble with every physiognomic change,
and from his facial topography of my fate,
I knew the dissolution of our bond was a matter of weeks.
 
Confidantes

My first confidante was a school classmate,
who also resided down our street.
Our golden hours were when we sat beneath
their huge Christmas, pine tree,
and in the glow of tinsel, bells, and crimson beads, 
we poured into each other’s ears
our life-long dreams.
She wanted a glamorous husband. 
I desired something more unique
that would take me somewhere beyond the ordinary.

My second confidante was a fellow flat-mate,
who was nearing completion of a postgraduate degree. 
She intimated her wish to marry her current date
simply because she dreaded becoming an old maid.
I told her the idea had never crossed my mind
although I was her senior by five years.
I was only planning a future career
after the completion of my Ph.D.

My third confidante was my first intimate relationship,
a man whose date of birth preceded mine by two decades.
I confided in him my inability to love again
for monogamy was my inherent trait.
He said seeing other women would not alter his esteem for me.
I disagreed
and left him wallowing in his own creed
of genteel promiscuity.