1
The children were there, & then they weren’t. For ten years at least, mothers had feared that the bread of affliction would return. The hotline that was supposed to help exploded. And these weren’t the only serious side effects. The air was full of people. Wherever a gaze touched, a faint scar-like impression remained.
2
So much has disappeared. The trees stand on their toes to get a better view. In one corner, a frantic little dog barks a warning; in another, women who took the drug still aren’t themselves. After a long period of inactivity, the full-length mirror will see all this acutely.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of the new poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a crisis center, which you can read about here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red.
His chapbook, The Devil’s Fuzzy Slippers, has just been published by Flutter Press.