Hell Is Where You Find It by Howie Good

There’s a moon and the night is clear. A man camping in the woods wakes up from a dream of a bear biting his head to find a bear biting his head. But you know what? Some mystics seek out difficult situations in order to improve their ability to meditate. One even tried to meditate while having sex. How many weirdos and imbeciles there are! A bunch of drunks in a pickup slow down to yell shit. Cops push a guy with dreads headfirst into a wall. The heart isn’t just empty, but abandoned, the pool of blood on the floor moving as if it were alive.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements, and winner of the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely.