“The Stillness of Seeds” © Bill Wolak

 

When Nothing Is Cool

A time for nothing much,
one child teasing another,
twins committing suicide together,
a man drinking in the woods.

We dialed F-U-C-K-Y-O-U
and L-O-V-E-Y-O-U
to see what happened.

Someone called Vincent
rang at the door and gave his ear
in a folded piece of paper
to the person who came to open it,
saying, “Take it, it will be useful.”

 

Assembled from three articles in Hyperallergic: “Figurative Painting That’s Emphatically Human,” “The Best Art Books to Read for Free in the NYPL’s New E-book App,” and “How Van Gogh’s Ear Incident Went Viral in 1888”

 

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.

Bill Wolak is a poet, photographer, and collage artist. He has just published his twelfth book of poetry entitled Love Opens the Hands with Nirala Press. His collages have been published in over a hundred magazines including: The Annual, Peculiar Mormyrid, Danse Macabre, Dirty Chai, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Lost Coast Review, Mad Swirl, Otis Nebula, and Horror Sleaze Trash. Recently, he was a featured poet at The Mihai Eminescu International Poetry Festival in Craiova, Romania. Mr. Wolak teaches Creative Writing at William Paterson University in New Jersey.