La Petite Mort
for Jones
1
I am to you as shadow
to shadowy blue,
and love is
the plump girl
who takes ballet
after school.
2
I have Mozart on.
All the windows are open.
From bushes and trees,
birds sing to each other,
sadly ambitious.
3
Animal noises in the night
and our bodies twisting together,
a kind of thunderstorm blue,
and then untwisting from within
like the surface of a mirror
rippled by a stranger’s breath.
Blue Territory
1
Above the bar, a big TV was playing without sound. You kept glancing up at the screen. I followed your empty gaze. A talk-show host, smiling with all his teeth, was shaking hands with a confessed criminal. They fell like two mountain climbers tied together.
2
It was hard to make sense of what was happening. Back then, I still cared about the news. Our blood escaped through every pore.
3
I found a bench overlooking the cemetery. A plaque in the ground described how you had split open like a carcass in a butcher’s shop. I half-closed my eyes in order to see only sky.
Art Information
- “Stillness of Time” © Anjan Chatterjee; Creative Commons license
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart with a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), plus numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently To Shadowy Blue (Gold Wake Press), Love Dagger (Right Hand Pointing), and Love in a Time of Paranoia (Diamond Point Press).
