Philosophers Have a Word for It

The kids with behavior problems lined up at the nurse’s office every day after lunch to take pills that chilled them out. If asked, even they would have known that Romeo and Juliet fell like two mountain climbers tied together. Slippery is a word that’s everywhere. Fish are slippery. Tears are slippery. The black dots in the distance may be animals slipping back across the border to escape the latest wildfire. I don’t doubt that there’s a hell and that we’re it. “Everything’s lost!” a man keeps shouting into the phone. It isn’t. No one knows why.











Howie Good’s latest poetry collection is Dark Specks in a Blue Sky from Another New Calligraphy. He is a recipient of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for his forthcoming collection Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements. He lives in New York.

More of his work in 3.4 here.
In 2.4 here.
And 1.3 here.
And 1.2 here.