Light Buried Underground
1
Weeping woman, look up here.
It seems a beautiful day.
Ovals lay eggs. We have flowers.
Even a simple call can turn into a racket,
self-reflection in bright yellow.
2
You are different now.
But not bad different.
Just, you know, not like 1999.
Go die, come back, I’ll love you.
Love will save us, love will save us.
Violet hearts run crimson tides.
Part 1 is assembled from the titles of artworks by Janelle Iglesias, Pablo Picasso, Ana Marie Hernado, Elliot Green, John Newman, Constance Hockaday, and Tamara Zahaykevich, and Part 2 from entries in the Typewriter Project (http://hyperallergic.com/309070/a-roving-typewriter-records-the-subconscious-of-new-york-city)
Guitaresque
Have you seen Betty? She has disappeared.
She has big boobs. She likes to dance.
He told her, “Keep this object carefully,”
and she immediately fainted. The show
just went on. There were so many guitars,
and they were so good. They were beautiful shapes,
fallen wood cut by lightning and thunder,
and moved by the winds and rivers over years.
Assembled from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/arts/international/van-gogh-ear-amsterdam.html; http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/11/nyregion/aerosmith-guitarist-joe-perry-hospitalized-after-staggering-off-stage-in-coney-island.html;
Time (Has Come Today)
Jesus Christ, how things change.
A boy came rolling over on blades
and looked at me intently, so I felt
obliged to quit my job. He had such
a cupful of freckles and the T-shirt
of a foreign football club. “Sir,
how many girlfriends do you have?”
he asked. I’m not the mad bastard
shouting at the world anymore. I replied
that I had enough with one. “Pfft,”
the boy said and then rolled away,
windblown headline on a dark pavement.
Assembled from a Facebook post by Tom Christiaens on 7/15/2016, translated from the Dutch, and from http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/arts/design/diane-arbus-met-breuer-in-the-beginning.html
Grass
There was only grass.
I couldn’t pass it through my throat.
Yet I forced myself to swallow
in front of the children
so they would accept it as food.
I start feeling anxious now
when I am in an open space.
I’m afraid of the blank.
I felt safer in the midst of the shelling.
I wish to become a dragon
and burn the scarves
and everything in that tent.
Assembled from the words of refugees from the Syrian civil war found at http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2016/07/20/blogs/a-syrian-refugee-captured-real-lives-and-surreal-dreams/s/end.html
When Nothing Is Cool
A time for nothing much,
one child teasing another,
twins committing suicide together,
a man drinking in the woods.
We dialed F-U-C-K-Y-O-U
and L-O-V-E-Y-O-U
to see what happened.
Someone called Vincent
rang at the door and gave his ear
in a folded piece of paper
to the person who came to open it,
saying, “Take it, it will be useful.”
Assembled from three articles in Hyperallergic: “Figurative Painting That’s Emphatically Human,” “The Best Art Books to Read for Free in the NYPL’s New E-book App,” and “How Van Gogh’s Ear Incident Went Viral in 1888”
http://hyperallergic.com/306811/figurative-painting-thats-emphatically-human
http://hyperallergic.com/311670/the-best-art-books-to-read-for-free-on-the-nypls-new-ebook-app
http://hyperallergic.com/82281/how-van-goghs-ear-incident-went-viral-in-1888
Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
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