1
I hear crying.
The crying goes on all night.
If I didn’t know better,
I’d think it was a baby crying,
it sounds so human in the dark.
My heart tries to sleep, but can’t.
I watch it walk away. I watch for a long time.
I watch my heart until it’s out of sight.
It never looks back. It doesn’t wave.
And then the street fills with bruised shoes
and the invention of gunpowder.
2
My heart returns in a dark overcoat,
the brim of its hat pulled low.
It talks rapidly, but also with a stutter,
like a tommy gun.
The couples at the other tables look away.
There are various theories as to why.
My heart draws a rough map
on the back of an envelope.
In the piney woods a fat and bleeding sheriff
is tied to a tree and crying for mercy.
3
An engine coughs to life.
Startled, I look up.
Defendants and their lawyers
are dancing around the cannon
on the little square of lawn
outside the courthouse.
They must believe the rain
has erased any fingerprints.
“But that’s stupid,” my heart murmurs,
even if something like it
happens nearly every afternoon.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University
of New York at New Paltz, is the author of eight poetry
chapbooks, including Police and Questions from Right Hand
Pointing (2008), Tomorrowland (2008) from Achilles
Chapbooks, The Torturer’s Horse (2009) from Recycled Karma
Press, and Love Is a UFO (2009) from Pudding House.