Sing a Song of Six-Packs
My wife says I yelled “Run!” in my sleep last night. It woke her up. I’m thankful I hardly ever remember my dreams. The psychiatric social worker on my “care team” has recommended I download Calm, advertised as “the #1 app for meditation and sleep.” A sleep aid I sometimes take before bed can leave me slow and dull in the morning, barely able to string two words together. Thoreau’s last words were “Moose, Indian.” Birds furnished background music. Every day should feel like a day you’ve never lived before.
Autobiographical Figment
My mom was 12 when she went to work cutting lace for bridal gowns in a sweatshop after school. “We were poor but didn’t know it,” she would often say as if political immaturity were a cause for boasting. She and my dad grew up just blocks apart on the Lower Eastside, children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Across the ocean, their aunts and uncles and grandparents were hunted by wolves. Death has many names. Once a month I receive an injection of a tumor necrosis factor blocker. To see myself as I am is to remember myself as I was, a wildly energetic boy his parents crumpled up and his teachers threw away.
Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz, where he taught journalism for 37 years. His latest poetry collection, True Crime, was published by Sacred Parasite in Berlin this year.