You’re the equivalent in French to “a crime gorgeously lit by big arched windows,” why street level drug dealers are now conniving to work their way up to roof level. Soon towns and even mid-sized cities are going to be petitioning to be renamed for you. A headline says Johnny Depp Is Radioactive, but how many people besides you know an isotope when they see one or that puddles are the autographs of rain? If you were a month, you’d be a torrential August. There are rose-choked paths winding through you where time is decomposing and the rain that shakes the petals loose shakes me.



Howie Good’s latest full-length poetry collection, Gun Metal Sky, is due in early 2021 from Thirty West Publishing,