Caution By Howie Good

 A bar girl with dark expressive eyes slipped onto the stool next to mine. At least she wasn’t the sort of person who would refer to poetry as “verse.” “I am here to entertain you,” she said, then quickly added, “but only during my shift.” I shrugged and turned back to finishing my beer and watching the game on the TV over the bar. She tried to engage me by telling a riddle: “Why are noses broken on Egyptian statues?” I didn’t respond in case she was wearing a wire. Prison workshops and rural cemeteries are filled with the incautious. 

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