Rainbow Potato

I tell myself I don’t belong here, and I don’t. The place is home to depressives, insomniacs, winos, recidivists. Trains pass through without whistling or slowing down. Meanwhile, stacks of coffins keep arriving in the dark by truck. The first thing I do most mornings is examine my face in the mirror for signs of fresh trauma. There was one morning when I asked Google if rainbow and potato rhyme. The answer came back, “Not exactly.” A handsome young drifter, stepping off the overnight bus from Providence, smiles plausibly while wearing a necklace of human ears tucked inside his shirt.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie's latest book is Frowny Face, a mix of his prose poems and handmade collages from Redhawk Publications.

Savage State

Special trains departed every hour on the hour for labor camps and reeducation centers. Hatchet-faced men in leather trench coats would grab people right off the street. I struggled hard to keep the look of the panic-stricken out of my eyes, the hitch of the guilt-ridden out of my step. It wouldn’t even be noon, and the sun would already be a dying ember in an ashen sky. There was no specific end to the workday. Steel bars had been installed on factory windows and suicide nets on the roofs. Manufacturers knowingly sold baby food contaminated with the devil’s tears.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of more than two dozen poetry collections, including most recently Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing, 2021).

Evolution #9

Yesterday was scheduled to be a holiday. Then shoals of fish came creeping over the hill, having grown rudimentary arms and legs. “What the fuck?!” you said as you watched them begin to blend in with the surroundings. Despite the invasion, no one was coming to save us. Some people panicked and, in their impatience to escape, broke out windows or jumped from moving trains. Others were climbing up to their roofs. I think this might be the way of the future, and just in case it is, maybe you should be standing over there helping hold the ladder steady.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie co-edits the journals Unbroken and UnLost.

Alice Falls For A Killer

She surmises blood stains under everything. His skin is cracked like hard dirt in a barren winter. "You could use baby oil," she says. Later, they share a half-gallon of chocolate chip ice cream, her treat. They always meet by the railroad tracks because of his love of trains and exit signs. He speaks in fragments, and she imagines his past is dammed up, full of unexplained absences. She wants to show him her breasts under the moonlight. She wants to hear him whistle so shrilly it will puncture the dark. Then, the darkness will erase the both of them.

From Guest Contributor Kyle Hemmings

Riding The Rails

Whenever I see a steam engine locomotive, I think of hoboes. Hopping on boxcars, riding the rails, free to travel the entire country, taking orders from no one.

As a child, I dreamed of life as a hobo. On Halloween, I would dress up in a tattered jacket, cut the fingers from my wool gloves, and go begging for candy. We once rode the Amtrak to Chicago, and I tried to board the freight car.

I have since learned that hobo life is not so romantic after all. Hoboes are just homeless alcoholics like the one who murdered my father.