Swerve by Howie Good

It’s a two-lane road
in rough repair,
and if you’re wasted
or simply speeding
and unfamiliar
with its idiosyncrasies,
the dips and sudden severe twists
as it winds around
the base of Illinois Mountain,
it can be dangerous,
but especially on nights like this,
when there’s no moon,
only the distant porch lights
of a few lonely houses,
and so dark that you risk not seeing
the cross of plastic flowers
by the crushed guardrail
just before thunder crashes
and the skies open up.



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