Angels and Crows

I was eight, maybe nine, when my little cousin stuck out her foot and tripped me, and my father, in a rage because I had chipped a front tooth, bounced my head off a wall. Forty years later, my cousin would be found dead in her bed from a drug overdose. If there were actually angels, would they fly in a V-formation like geese, you think? Someone was just telling me that crows can hold a grudge for a year or more against a person who has mistreated them. When I walk, wherever I walk, my shadow walks ahead of me.

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Author Bio

I could advertise the network of scars I bear from a neurotic upbringing, or say I live mostly in my head, or even joke that I am a noted writer of blurbs for other people’s poetry books, and I could do it, just as required by your submission guidelines, in “50 words or less,” but it wouldn’t be the whole truth, more like the article of clothing given to a search dog to learn the scent of a person who has gone missing.

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Howie Good is the author most recently of the poetry collections Gunmetal Sky (Thirty West Publishing) and Famous Long Ago (Laughing Ronin Press).