Big Hall

robusto and pine, an easy sell 

to sit away an afternoon

feet stirring, moving the fossils below

this is the west, in sweet disappear

my paper is a dry stock drinker today

so here we are, both barbate

i’m clicking the pen, the sterile

gun gone slung, slug gone

and nothing comes, no big breath

no holler, just a pleasant thought 

of your selected works, the mt kearsarge

you buried here, you left it

in here, but i can’t see it today

meet me tomorrow, with pencil

Wednesday Poetry Prompt #528: a big blank poem

You can make the gravy into a train

Stop there, the roux

thick, buttery like wind 

stirring sunlight

in a brush fire smoke

horses hurried into volunteer trailers

when the giddyup frenzy

is hazy and fresh, unsifted ash 

blows like flour over the roses

under a charred rock, a rattler

renders his fat, sizzling, dripping 

snake stock, stirred in airdrop slurry 

fertilizer red powder tamping the blaze

the salt, the anxious Rio Salado

running down the ranchers’ faces

boarding cattle onto the flatbeds, their lives

spent prepared for this round up

Juanita, in the kitchen, readies for 

evacuation: the peppers, minced thyme

the smudging sage, loaded in her

1978 Ford Pinto Runabout painted locomotive black 

Writers’ Pantry #26: “You can make anything by writing”

Poem: A Middle School Book Report, page 31

Willa Cather Review vol. 61, no. 2, Spring 2019

Willa Cather Review

Paved

The dirt is all pioneer and wagon rust, host
     to impromptu rodeos prompted
By the kick whoop of a week
     done well, but that was

Decades before, before

Main Street words like mercantile
     and Winchester
          dwindled with the wells

The dirt was still pioneer when Wilma Mason
     wreaked havoc by whispering
          Woolworths so often

That the womens’ dreams of tulip sundaes
      felt like adultery and made church hurt

The dirt, though soft and polished,
Remains pioneer, though unseen,

Though under the asphalt and empty
      store fronts’ lazy gaze

Over all that is entombed
Underneath: lost teeth, lost buckles
A Tibetan saddle blanket displaced,
Spoons and spurs pressed into the caliche
Like dinosaur femurs waiting for the
New wave of pioneers to pull up
The pavement and discover and gawk

Before rolling out the new hyperspeed
     single bullet magnet track for yet
          another future

To blow past town without a boot
Ever kicking the storied dirt

You Will Wish for Death

MACBETH

I bear a charmed life, which must not yield,

To one of woman born.

MACDUFF

Despair thy charm

the event, however you know it,

lingers in the conjured air, a final 

drowned bubble breaks the surface, a smoke

barrel empties through the kitchen wall 

the event, however you know it, is not yours

not exclusively, it is an attendant fool

attending to every certainty,   

certainly making fools of us all

our Jehovahs come without footnotes

our successions come interrupted

there are no stones to press 

against our ear, no revelations

of truth—just a roulette spin

landing on the improbable psalm 

coughing in a minor key, the chorus

sings ah, shit

until our griefs are polished,  

refracting the Kingdom, a bread 

baked weird, a moment so broken

it flips the poles of the earth 

upended, life will do that, break out 

in an event, a heartbreak so deep

it reverses the flow of blood

in the body

_____
Poets and Storytellers United: Well, that was unexpected

Faust Born Again

Mephistopheles: 

Now you speak more sensibly again, my friend!

You may yet naturally regain your youth, 

but that is written in a different book

and constitutes a special chapter. 

• Goethe

Oh devil, 

look, look

Now I have stepped away

from your crumbling book

    too old for this, and by some measure

        too young for this

So, pass it on

let your demons know 

my skeletal message flows graphic

rebellion on my mind, a secret source

trusted and tympanic

your power deflated, too dramatic, Germanic

your offer leaves me anaphylactic

here is my exit, my mouthful of noise

    singing in one cerebral cortex

        deflecting your contract

your myths are buried beneath the museums

and no one will believe them, I am staged

for a glorious debut, waiting on the rain

of ravishing reviews, you

were clever once, but

    it’s a racket, this pamphlet, I still

        had to pay taxes, these pages

hot-leaded, soiled with flashbacks

of loved ones I outlived, villain, 

my touch screen gone stone, atomic, and raged

Enter (blasted devil) the digital age

I deleted the last page, no

signature, you have lost my name

in the warring signals of skin and silicon

devil, move on 

my rythym rides the red line at a speed I choose

where there is no catch

Old Meph, get thee behind me, 

my mother is aching, her section is cesarian,

not born of woman, I am erupting

from her body multi-nonagenarian

go on, go on, the deal is long gone

and in despair you will watch me respawn

in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1….