Yes, Dr. NoI’m told to go sit in the waiting area while “the laser heats up,” and for an instant, I’m not at the clinic or some anxious old man unable to see out his left eye, I’m with Sean Connery/James Bond in Dr. No, the scene where he’s tied spreadeagle on a steel table, and even as the fiery red laser beam that cuts through metal creeps closer and closer and closer to his, you know, “equipment,” he banters with the archvillain, demonstrating to each of us caught in our own desperate straits the art of living bravely under imaginary circumstances. MessengersSometime in the middle of the night they reached the house. I was jabbed awake with the point of a dagger. A very tall man with a scraggly chin beard and eyes that were noticeably misaligned stood beside the bed looking pityingly down at me while his confederate stayed back in the shadows. Not something, the man said without prologue, but a whole world of things. He said it in a low, whispery voice I had to strain to hear. Before I could even process his words, he and his confederate had slipped out the door. Clouds shaped like vague suspicions of vast conspiracies were just starting to pinken. Turn Back When PossibleEverything appears gray or white, and after only a few days, I start to miss seeing things that are green. The people I depend on for advice don’t want to talk about it or even acknowledge a problem exists. I scan the morning headlines. Bosnians are still finding in woods and fields and under rubble bodies from the genocide their leaders claim never happened. A year passes, two – long, black banners inscribed with ribald epithets and strange threats. The dentist bangs on my tooth. “That hurt?” he asks. I smell earth, hear birds chirp. It hurts. Eye (‘I’) TroubleThe nurse trainee administered numbing drops to my left eye only. Three days earlier, I had seen black letters of the Hebrew alphabet outlined in fire in the sky. The room where I now writhed in the exam chair was uncomfortably warm. As the doctor bent over me, I thought I heard him use the vague but sinister phrase “tattooed mind.” An object is never so closely attached to its name that another can’t be found for it. For example, my dad. He tried to kill himself three times – well, four if you count the time he fell asleep smoking in bed and woke up with the world in flames. So WhatI was taught growing up to act like you don’t realize you’re being watched. It’s often, if incorrectly, called “default mode.” When the Lord spoke from a cloud, I would glance around to make sure no one was listening who shouldn’t be. The unfortunate phrase “the rising tide of communism” for some reason still sticks in his mind. A lot of people my age can’t see or hear well enough to distinguish one person from another. So what? A bird hasn’t an arm but the continent of the sky. Howie Good is the author most recently of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022. His previous poetry collections include Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press) and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).
Read their work from the inaugural issue here.
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