Red Shuttleworth
We Drank Tequila One Time
She lives naked
in a disused jet liner
parked outside Brawley,
grit blowing through
where the cockpit
windows used to be.
For fun she took
a branding iron
to a library table:
they didn’t stock
any Anne Carson.
The next part features
cigars, her newswoman
clippings for a weekly
paper advertising wasp spray,
family reunions, canned stew.
Her brag is how she goes
to confession in short skirts,
no panties, to have something
cool for the priest lost
from a bear robbed of her whelps.
The Too Small Dress
Mojave motel parking lot:
an old man shakes,
lights a half-cigarette,
smiles. Darlin’ leans on me,
sweaty like horse sweat
stirred into crushed strawberries.
The road through Mesquite-Ely-Wells
is one coyote after another
dead or dying... southbound.
We’re baking frozen pizza
with back window sunlight.
Darlin’s dress pulls apart
all day long... small pink buttons.
Ivory skin peeks through.
We pray for those who lived
by tossing maguey ropes.
We churn in a Wells pool,
don’t check-in at the motel,
chew pizza all the way to Jackpot.
For Those Who Cry to Sleep
Stars roll over fresh-clipped grass.
Lynx bones rattle on a front porch...
a skull so white it can be seen
from a military satellite.
Scripture excretes cartons
from a Dallas TV station.
At three a.m. a girl calls
our motel room to say
she pawned her daddy’s shark
teeth to buy gas to pole dance
for deer mice in Boulder.
At first light, in a desert
downpour, I take
a snapshot of Darlin’
fronting a dozen black
cow-calf pairs
beneath turquoise clouds
as if this is any answer.
Barb Wire Conclusions
Sundown and the Wolfhound
barks at an empty cattle truck
rattling under center pivot spray.
An empty popcorn box
blows through sagebrush.
We are outside, watching
a pair of serenity ninnies
in cheap black suits
bicycle away on gravel.
Frankie-the-Knife
phones or doesn’t phone
from Vegas about a chop shop
Caddie with old time fins,
pebbled white paint job
that resembles dried
Cream of the West,
my favorite cereal.
The Wolfhound tells me,
Everyone’s got their own
tear-stained postcards.
What there’ll be tonight
is another lonesome
moon restless over America.
Bio
Red Shuttleworth, poet and playwright, primarily of the American West, is the author of Western Settings (University of Nevada Press, 2000), which received the first Spur Award for Poetry from Western Writers of America in 2001. True West magazine named Shuttleworth “Best Living Western Poet” in 2007. His poems, one-act plays, and short stories have appeared in over a hundred journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Blue Mesa Review, Chum, Clare, Concho River Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Minnetonka Review, Neon, Ontario Review, Plains Song Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Roundup Magazine, South Dakota Review, Southwest Review, Suisun Valley Review, and Weber: The Contemporary West. Red Shuttleworth is part of the Gonzo Western Poetry movement, closely associated with poets and songwriters J.V. Brummels,Kirk Robertson, Tom Russell, and Paul Zarzyski. Learn more about him by visiting his website.