Skeleton Hospital
Howie Good
Dresden on Fire. Source: The Atlantic
Skeleton Hospital
She lost a shoe as they dragged her from the Hotel Eden to the waiting car. Lieutenant Vogel, commander of the unit, shouted insults (“Whore!”) and spat at her. She was bleeding from a blow to the head with a rifle butt, but could still see with the eye that didn't have blood in it. As they put her into the car, she saw the dark breath of the future—corpses in the street, Berlin burning, rubble everywhere. Then she passed out. They would take her to the hospital only when they were sure she was already dead.
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The decrepit cadaver of a man, seated in a ground-floor window of a sort of medical penitentiary, glared at you from the black pits of his empty eyeholes. Go away, he mouthed through the glass. You responded by brandishing the hammer you had taken to carrying everywhere for protection. It was only just noon, but the sun was a fading ember in an ashen sky.
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As a youngster, I juggled my own head on street corners for nickels and dimes. Some who stopped to watch said the little smile on my face made the performance strangely worse. If I knew how things were going to turn out, I suppose I wouldn’t have bothered smiling.
A Gift for Self-Sabotage
I ignore the warning label on the bottle of painkillers and wash the pill down with wine. An hour later, I feel as though I’m desperately working the oars of an unwieldy rowboat. Waves break over the sides. Fish crash against the keel in a vindictive attempt to topple me overboard. Somewhere in the background, power lines are singing, “Sha-boom, sha-boom.” Don’t ask me what this means. I don’t know what it means. The body of a woman has just been pulled from the inky water of the canal. “When you build high,” the bridge tender often observes, “folks will jump.”
Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), and Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing).