$10.00
by John Goode
Relentlessly, the images come to do what they have to do. At once, full of compassion without the pitiful face, then furious without commonplace madness. This work sits in front of and behind and to the side of itself, watching. This is not an easy task. To call it human underestimates it. Graduating from Eternity forces me to believe God happens, not God is.
—Collin Bunting
Cross a waterfall with a cave, and you get the poetry of John Goode. His poems occupy a turbulent landscape, ghosted with shadows, full of movement. They are dangerous, craggy, sensuous, and vulnerable. The cascade of his surreal images and wild juxtapositions are disorienting in the best possible way. They might carry you over the edge.
—Nina Corwin, author of The Uncertainty of Maps
Somewhere between post modernism and mystic realism is the poetry of John Goode. His rapid fire similes weave neon tapestries of urban social decay and heartbreak covering a dark wit and social commentary. One of the best of a new generation.
—David Hargarten, publisher Exact Change Only
The caliber of John Goode's poems and images are so consistently high that not one stands out as the definition. This poet measures essences of truths, heavy, gritty and immense. Distinctly animal. Effortlessly male. The very blood of art graces these pages. Rampant, beautiful, and aware.
—Dana Jerman
John Goode is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals including, Rattle, Skidrow Penthouse, LIT, Mudfish, Slipstream, Axe Factory Review, Bottle of Smoke Press, Afterhours, Waiting for the Bus, and Arsenic Lobster, among others. He was first runner up for the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle. He lives and works in Chicago, where he has collaborated and performed with various musicians such as Grazyna Auguscick and Tim Haldeman on the albums Man Behind the Sun and Open Water as a Child (for the Flint Michigan water crisis), and at venues such as The Chopin Theater, Sleeping Village, and The Museum of Contemporary Art.
by John Goode
The Living City
The church mouse moans.
The daffodil braces.
The sun spills like a drug into a thousand faces.
The rheumy-eyed gutter pigeon,
the jasmine-drunk caddis fly,
square off like an argument of absolutes.
A cuckolded swan skewers a leisure-minded toad
and lifts his bald ass to the sky like an Aztec priest.
Wasps with belts of fire swarm the sweaty month of the ant.
Beautiful black-limbed asbestos roaches with scalloped noses
stomp like an army of one.
A mosquito with a shaved tongue and a small brass heart
suckles on her lover's cold silver ankle,
while a cricket bleeds fallopian oil into a bed
of shuffling lint.
Butterflies with suitcases of pearl
descend on crumbling lilac.
And the honey bee drops like a bomb its prescription of sugar.
The manna-filled city rat. Quixote invert. Lover of toenails.
Egyptian-snouted prince of scullery corners.
Blue-balled cocksman of the alleys of hair.
Throat like a used tire.
Bell-shaped head ringing electricity.
Skin as cold as a capital letter.
Stomach like a growling shoe.
Hungers for a chunk of discarded Polish deli sandwich
he spots half a block away.
His eyes, uncut diamonds, pulled from the lies of many stones.
The buzzing midsection of the yeast fizzes
like a stray dog's breast milk.
His lips like stove pipe shavings, curl.
His brain, a nimble casket circling death.
And those ears, rising like aerials, fill
with taxicabs, sirens, and the wails of lonely animals.
He runs like love in the rain
bled from an old wound.
The Possessed
She was made of dice and black mascara,
and she roamed the streets in a cocktail napkin.
She was no lover. She hated nearly everything:
billboards, strollers, iced tea, mutual funds.
She had a mouth like a sword fight,
all curses and water and clashing teeth.
When she pissed the electricity went out
in three apartments.
On nights of extreme ecstasy
she was labeled a heretic by passing monks
who tortured pillowcases dreaming of her
Rabelaisian thighs.
The streetlights held her in staged awe
and cars roared around her dripping oil.
When she cut her hair
fiends raided hospitals for signatures
and young poets swore into their scarves.
Her skin was like the breathing snow
alley cats lick to slake their newspaper throats.
She worked as a waitress beneath the Republican
penthouses that stalked the night with flat screen eyes.
She was in love with a man who sold the dimple in his chin
and wore wristwatches with electric pentagrams inside.
She bartered for fruit in the farmer's market
and her eyes suffered like starving bellies -
I could see the ribcages in her mind.
It isn't easy, nothing ever is, she told me one day,
as we shared a cigarette above the grenade hatchings.
I could almost hear the seams in her delirium unsnapping,
minute by minute, the way she hungered for a boat
was nearly obscene. Escape, escape, she whispered
like a litany.
Cleopatra in Traffic
for C.N.B.
I stared into the dead blue sex of her eyes.
They haunted catacombs.
Maniacal flowers grew giant bells of pollen.
A tender savage followed her scent to the edge of a dried up ocean.
I looked into the soundless milk of her skin.
Raw silk raced on curves of smoke.
A militant country sought a ransom in scarves.
Her legs became defiant outposts.
I whispered into her eyes three weeks of courage.
I longed to touch the gaunt drum of her stomach,
to breathe the smoking column of her throat,
the succulent red bell her lips composed at the face of any language.
In each twisted ear I wanted to plant a tongue with my name in brail
coaxing her toward me
where her black hair might spread like an orchestra of fertile spiders
biting my lips like anarchy.
Pillows.
Where she could gather like a mute cloud ponderous and thick
and swollen her pale body vessel for a currency in lust.
I stole for her bracelets of wine
and gaudy necklaces beaded with the slow fever of morphine.
Long blank silences of nitrous enveloped her.
The street pawed her like a bad transmission
and she captured it
in living orange.
She inhaled pharmacies.
Her mouth opened on the ends of sentences like a heart-shaped bomb.
Cold green mountains stood up.
The wind wrote a letter in fire.
Traffic swayed in agony at the temple of her hips.
She beat off brick.
Glass drank her body like an open vein of water.
She broke codes behind the eyes of commuters.
She flirted with the thick mustache of gasoline
and I chained myself to her waking.
I stared into the starving calculus of her eyes
where antiseptic numbers drummed for sleep
and hospitals rolled like empty cars.
I smelled rain.
I smelled autumn burning.
I smelled the wilderness that grew inside the animal of her mind
where she dreamed hands without rings racing her skin like desultory winters.
Where she surrendered years of wisdom
and opened her legs like the soft white teeth of a swimming pool,
and painted a circle at the bottom
where her heart beat like a wild penny
and no one ever touched.
Copyright © 2024 Rain Mountain Press. Site by Jonathan Penton.