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

Precarious Rhapsody
Howie Good & Stacie Johnson

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A Genealogy

The place had no name and then it had too many. It was a good thing you weren’t there. My parents made me take piano. Cable TV hadn’t been invented yet. Grown-ups told the same stories over and over, just sometimes using different words. A voice warned against keeping the baby rabbits – hairless, anxious, blind – that I found abandoned under a big bush. I was six, maybe seven, and the yard was in shadow. We’ve all lost things. We’ve all had things torn from us. And not only things. Any instrument not played regularly forgets how it’s supposed to sound.

Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

I ask a friend if she can remember the last time that the stars and moon hatched from a golden egg. She doesn’t answer straightaway, just tucks a stray comma of hair back behind her ear. Because it’s one in the morning, the darkness outside is more like a solid than a liquid or a gas. I’m suddenly really tired of struggling to stay awake. The answer comes later, when I read in the paper that they sliced open a dead whale that had washed ashore and found in its belly plastic cups, plastic bottles, plastic bags, and two flip-flops.

Precarious Rhapsody

There’s very little clutter. I can’t say it won’t ever come back. Tomorrow or the next day everyone may be displaying busts of Roman emperors on shelves and side tables and deer heads on walls. It’s what happens when the sick rule the world, people start naming their children after guns: Kalashnikov, Markov, Remington. They feel they have to, especially when the landscape has that gray wintry look. Do I believe the Earth is shaped like a Frisbee? Ah, no, but I’d do anything, absolutely anything, to avoid sitting in a chair with a backrest made of flaming birthday candles.

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Prose poems:  Howie Good.  Paintings:  Stacie Johnson.

Howie Good is the author of The Titanic Sails at Dawn (Alien Buddha Press, 2019).

Stacie Johnson is a NYC-based painter who has exhibited widely in the states and abroad. In 2010, she co-founded the artist-run gallery Regina Rex. In the Spring of 2019, Johnson presented a solo exhibition at Elijah Wheat Showroom.