Corey Howard
They Started Doing It Again
Unplugging the earth
With pounds and grease
The sound is repeating
Like the tear of weeds from
Our own garden of fears
Look at this: one is nearly
Healed. Without us,
Maybe it would have
Done it by itself
Maybe not, but it's
A nice thought
And isn’t that more
Than what we currently have
To live for,
Us weeds,
Soiling ourselves in dirt
Across the realm
Of our capabilities.
But I do wonder
How much it hurts
To deroot oneself
I wonder if it’s
Too much to ask
The grower
To leave
The holes be
For some while
Until filled in
On their own
​
The Mountains Chatter
Of the dusk as it levels into the snow.
There’s whispering of why it’s happening,
Why dusk is so high up,
Where all is mostly unaffected.
The mountains chatter within the wind
And the wind always laughs on their backs.
So why now
Does the darkness break to more darkness?
Ask the dusk itself, over coffee,
Over a millennium of coffee and oats and dead things.
See what it has to say.
I don’t think it will be much.
But then again, who is to say
Who crossed the imaginary line?
Maybe it was the mountains
Who climbed through first,
And now, the slightest revenge.
Future
Dark and spinning on top of the lights of eyes,
The future, won’t be so bright.
You blink, and nothing new passes by.
You blink, and thanks for that.
In the future no broken hearts,
Only spinning lights and Jupiter sightings.
The orange flowers outside of flower beds and stones
Entering empty driveways and beach fronts.
It’s almost like backyards that are familiar but are not at all.
Future light jackets in the summer time rain and no commanding officers
As if one needed reasons any more
To call out what one needs to call out.
Yelling now’s, a little different. Heavier. Stalled.
A couple books of matches unlit on a dusty brown desk.
Friends, old and young, dead or gone, in the light of it all, are
Not so sad any longer. I couldn’t tell you why but they’re not.
The future’s not so sick and tired anymore
Like coffee on someone else’s couch or roof or front porch.
Straining to turn around to see if there’s a light or not.
...and the hills are almost full here, man.
There’s trash but mostly there’s people and they are full of something.
Sometimes shit, but mostly kind, soothing words, and nothing.
You ride a bike down a hill and run over everyone’s nothing.
You blast a note from a trumpet horn and hear very little to nothing.
In the future we drink water from cracked chalices that refill when they’ve been drank.
Sure, there’s still wine. Plenty of it. And crackers with cheese
And a goddamn hole in the moon
When the sun came up one day and barrelled right into it.
We miss you here.
Here, we would’ve smoked weed together in peace and
In the grass we would have lain down together,
and the moon would revolve us around our griefs
While styrofoam coffee cups bless our lips.
Corey Howard is a poet, chef, and musician living in Brighton, MA. He works too much and creates too little. He is the editor in chief of Mammouth Poetry, a monthly publishing site for poetry. His poems can be found in I Want You to See This Before I Leave Zine, Entropy, The New England Review of Books, Hollow, and others. He reads out at Bow Market each month, and supports local presses and mics as much as he can. He is 27 years old and swinging.