I sit there staring at the screen as though this weren’t a sort of piped-in hallucination, but a keyhole through which one can see everything. Annoyingly, the guy sitting behind me keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs and kicking the back of my seat. The audience is wondering how Jesus’ predicted return to Earth will shake up the hierarchy of the Marvel Universe. In the meantime, a dusty cowboy appears over the horizon on a dapple-gray. He has a face like cracked leather from reading all 688 pages of Finnegans Wake by the flickering light of campfires. “There’s some things,” he tells his horse, “a man just can’t ride around.”


Howie Good is the author most recently of the poetry collection Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).