After long drought, press-ganged sailors, riding the flood tide, learn to be water, the key to everything. They keep an eye out for the area where the crime occurred. “What was it like, the end of the owls?” children may someday ask. The captain feels a hazy sadness as if the last video store in existence has closed. There’s a remedy for the guy who is sick of his line of work, but it requires stacked sandbags to keep bullets from ricocheting around the room.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of several poetry collections, including most recently Beautiful Decay and The Cruel Radiance of What Is from Another New Calligraphy and Fugitive Pieces from Right Hand Pointing Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.