s w i f t s  &  s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings

Fluid Possibilities
Howie Good & Robert Streicher

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Notes on an Investigation

Ludwig Wittgenstein was so absorbed in splashing around in the tub – part of his investigation into the fluid possibilities of language – that he couldn’t hear his old friend, Professor Einstein, pounding on the front door. They were going to miss a campus talk on the metaphysical implications of black holes if Wittgenstein didn’t hurry up. Einstein, whom Wittgenstein affectionately called “the dopey one,” had been looking forward all week to the lecture. As the minutes slipped away, he began impatiently pelting the bathroom window with pebbles, though he knew in his heart this was useless. It was as if the real world were small, way too small for anyone to notice.

The Year of

Because you were watching the waves roll in, and not where you were walking, you very nearly stepped with bare feet on the rotting remains of a gull’s wing, just a few straggly flight feathers still clinging to a shattered frame of hollow bones that nature had designed for soaring.

&

Sleep is the trend of the time. You introduce house plants with the intent to clear out the air and feel the chlorophyll wash over your nerves.

&

They enter by force, breaking the locks on the door. Many are wearing white coats as if they were doctors. You’re punched and slapped before you can even protest. With one “doctor” on each side, you’re steered out of your apartment and down the stairs and into the back of a van. There is a thin black strip of cloud like a blindfold across the pockmarked face of the moon.

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Paintings: Robert Streicher.  Prose poems: Howie Good.

Howie Good’s latest poetry collection, Gun Metal Sky will soon be out from Thirty West Publishing.

Robert streicher is a painter and choreographer in New York City.