Squabble

Up from clamor of Thanksgiving dinner, two voices drowned out the rest. Uncle Frank (Mom's brother) and Uncle Norm (Dad's brother), were at first pointedly not talking towards each other as they contradicted everything the other said. Then it was raised voices, direct, insistent, until they were shouting over everyone, ignoring their wives' pleas.

Then the fighting really began, first with silverware, then a carving knife versus a brass candlestick, then gunfire and light artillery. By this time, the two halves of the family had divided.

There would be no more Thanksgiving dinners until after the war was long over.

Reign Of Terror

When the reign of terror begins in earnest, a street corner poet with hollow cheeks and large feverish eyes will sit at the anchor desk delivering the news in a toothless mumble and then ignore increasingly frantic signals and pleas to go to commercial break and instead recite between pulls on a bottle a long, rambling, incendiary poem, his voice rising and falling like a medieval executioner’s double-sided axe, until all the baskets are filled with the heads of our namesakes and the only sound that is still worth heeding is the disputatious sound of the children’s orchestra tuning up.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie's latest full-length poetry collection, Gun Metal Sky, is due in early 2021 from Thirty West Publishing.

Double Down

Dave peered from his bunker across the smoldering horizon. He refused to cry.

That charred skeleton of masonry and rebar had once been home. People he knew had died in those streets, now nothing more than corpses and ruin.

After the initial wave of destruction came the pestilence and blight. The rotting skin and miracle pleas suggested a biblical retribution was at hand. The metaphor was on everyone's lips, but Dave clamored against it. He blamed the whining snowflakes who refused to accept they had lost.

Dave remained certain. This outcome was still better than if she had been elected.