Sparrows by Howie Good

Inside the Home Depot, I hear but can’t see the birds
chirping away among the exposed steel beams overhead –
house sparrows, probably. Halloween has only just ended.
The red Christmas poinsettias on display, when I look closer,
prove to be fabric. I ask a man in a carpenter’s apron who isn’t
a carpenter where the heavy-duty tarps are. “Aisle 41,” he says
and points. The word “cancer” follows me. It is the scariest word
in the language, scarier somehow than even “death.” I am being
murdered by my own body. The sparrows go on chirping their
simple three-note song as if there is no extra time for complexity.



Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.

Measuring the Foundation by Steve Klepetar

I look at the cabin, it’s splintery walls.
My father walks around outside,
measuring the foundation.
He has carried a tire from the truck,
and he sits now by the edge of the lake.
Turtles swim in the shallows.
I find a pair of hiking boots
with one lace missing, a rusty canteen,
a hand axe with a chipped blade.
It begins to rain, and we remember
the misspelled sign in a neighborhood store:
TURTELS FOR SALE.
The owner had fallen asleep at the counter.
Even the little bell failed to wake him.
We slipped out through the back door,
hungry for soup or bread or something
we couldn’t yet name. Night had come on
and streetlights glowed along the avenue.
It’s been a day of memories, which can seem
like ghosts in the half light, or the ending of a dream.



Steve Klepetar lives in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual and serves on the editorial staff of Right Hand Pointing. His poems have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.