A Castle In Disneyland
Someone said it came in a pill. I was suffering from what I thought was a tumor or a fever, but turned out to be simple depression. A girl with her shirt off stood on the tracks, blocking the train. I never did hear why. There were lawyers and police, as well as alternate jurors. I slept OK for once. No one had told me that it may cause drowsiness. I had to help myself. Why wait for lowercase g to have its tail fully restored? This was about 20 years ago. I worried about who I was – a child crying, or a man dancing with a large woman, or both.
Wildlife
I’m stopped at the light on the corner of Old New Paltz Road and Route 299. Cars kill approximately 25,000 Americans a year. A woodchuck standing up on its hind legs is staring at me. It stares as if trying to remember where it knows me from. Vincent would’ve died in obscurity were it not for his brother Theo, the art dealer. The light is still red. By the time I look back, the woodchuck has vanished into the grass on the side of the road. Not many know me from when I was the fat kid in fifth grade.
The Flaw
1
There was a dog that came
at twilight every day.
A big dog. Kind of a mutt.
He would come and just stare at me.
I mean a dog, not barking, not licking,
just looking right through you.
I don’t particularly like dogs.
Well, I love stray dogs,
dogs who don’t like people.
And that’s the kind of dog picture
I would take if I ever took a dog picture.
2
Nothing
is ever the same
as they said
it was.
It’s what I’ve
never seen before
that I recognize.
It’s a little bit
like walking
into an hallucination
without being
quite sure
whose it is.
3
You see someone on the street
and what you notice about them is the flaw.
It’s just extraordinary that we should
have been given these peculiarities.
And, not content with what we were given,
we create a whole other set.
And that’s what all this is a little about.
That somebody else’s tragedy
is not the same as your own.
Source: Tape recordings of a series of classes Diane Arbus gave in 1971 as transcribed in Diane Arbus (Aperture, 1972).
Fruit Fly Trap
I’ve stopped recommending your book to people. All my friends hated it. I think it’s the font. It seems designed for dyslexics. I’m still using, though, the directions you gave for building a fruit fly trap. Half-fill a glass with red wine. Take a cone-shaped coffee filter and make a small hole at the bottom of it. Place the cone in the glass, being careful that the hole remains above the surface of the wine. Scotch-tape the cone to the sides of the glass. The fruit flies, attracted to the wine, will enter, be sealed inside the glass, and drown. By the way, you were right. They do especially like merlot.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Middle of Nowhere (Olivia Eden Publishing) and the forthcoming poetry chapbooks The Complete Absence of Twilight (Mad Hat Press), Echo's Bones and Danger Falling Debris (Red Bird Chapbooks), and An Armed Man Lurks in Ambush (unbound CONTENT). He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.