Red Shuttleworth
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Postcard to Jerry L. Crawford
Dear Jerry, We’re at the radiant-blood precipice,
tumbleweeds snagged by barb wire. Yesterday,
as daybreak floated across rock and sagebrush,
someone left a blood-dripping, gut-and-lung shot
coyote in a shopping cart in the Moses Lake
Wal-Mart parking lot. The cart boy, Brent,
was dispatched to have a look.
It didn’t fucking starve to death, he told his boss
before phoning me. This is not, Jerry,
theatre for castratos of the New Yorker variety.
As I rolled up in my cherry-red Mustang,
chewing tobacco, listening to the Cowboy Junkies,
Brent was laying a couple of large black plastic bags
over the bullet-riddled carcass in the cart.
It caught me in its gaze, Brent whined,
like I was the pimplehead who shot it.
I told him to shut up. A crowd was gathering.
Then the wind lifted the bags and they spun
off the the cart and a clownish girl, with orange hair
and a black dog collar, began dancing.
A guy in the crowd snapped, For Christ’s sake,
Nina, we came here for groceries and beer!
So Brent pushed the dead coyote cart
around to the back of the store, dumped the coyote
at the edge of the lake where we buried it
with brand new, soon-to-be-on-sale shovels.
It’s a bit like baseball, Jerry:
where the head goes, the body follows.
We’re almost over the wall, Red.
A Plastic Dashboard Jesus?
You kiddin’?
I’d rather worm dogs for a living, she said,
drunk as ten Saturday night cowgirls,
but she clobbered into his pick-up truck
outside of Minot, said, Okay, gimme shelter.
The night was cold as half-frozen milk.
An hour later she told the rancher,
I’m so bored I could piss on your car seat,
then fell into the amusements of dream-sleep.
And he steered onto a backlands dirt road,
reckoned she was likely not the dimpled bride
at the end of the rainbow. She woke at dawn
on a mouse-gnawed couch, under a green counterpane.
Outside the howling wind came from the northwest
and a cow was on the rickety front porch
trying to look inside through plastic sheeting,
snow drifting all around. The unopened mail
said the man could buy gunk for foot bacteria,
renew rodeo and cattlemen’s magazines,
or get his hearing tested for free.
The spring prairie was enormous,
seemed to sing, Warning: Red Roses.
The rancher had nothing to offer
but a dusty sky, a new summer,
a pair of dozen-year-old cow horses,
basic satellite TV, and white-faced cattle.
Postcard to Julie Jensen
Dear Miss Julie, Gust of arctic win and I shamble
into an all-night roadside café. My casual seizures
of inappropriate rage or amusement are twenty years
north of Vegas and Red Rock. In one booth
a couple of kids are mutually glazed
with denim ‘n leather seduction. Up the aisele
there’s a girl with frizzed blonde hair,
blue fingernails, and kippered face,
bred LDS-upright and tamped down,
wickedly perfumed, trembling over coffee...
a character from one of your plays?
The waitress jingles and scuffs toward me
with a dog-eared menu, grins like a rock chuck.
Unshaven for days and not a fraction rich,
I still listen to my lunatic heart.
My waitress has cigarette burns in her voice.
She’s stoned, chewing gum. I order
a night’s sleep covered with a buffalo robe.
She serves me charred bacon and gooey
fried eggs, says, as if I’ve invited her to bed,
I don’t trust guys in snap shirts and trophy buckles.
She’s ice rain on warped corral boards.
Julie, you the bump
of this country. Love, Red.
A Place with Gold Tablecloths and Blue Curtains
Two Rice coeds agree there’s a bond
between Eros and Thanatos. They’re dark-haired,
full-lipped, with only a little belly pudge,
loud... as if I’m required to eavesdrop.
The older one has cruel circles under her eyes,
a marble nature, says she’s sorry,
but her boyfriend’s hairy back trips up her desire.
Storm clouds bounce off the windows as I reread
Goyen’s House of Breath, east Texas nostalgia
written from Rome, then Lawrence’s Taos,
sacrifice rearranged as good fortune gone bad.
The younger girl, proud to be fickle and near-blonde,
spoons at blackberry yogurt, says,
Whenever someone criticizes me for smoking,
I tell ‘em I don’t watch TV
and at least I don’t eat meat.
The girls offer surplus smiles on their way out
to a yellow prom-cake-echoes Toyota.
The Houston Chronicle advice column
says Jesus is glum today,
that life ought to be more than hollow lovers
at the end of a smoke and lightning-hearted run.
It’s Goyen’s old question: can we be brave enough
to accept the fever blessings of who we are?
These poems first published in Red Shuttleworth's chapbook, Drug Store Vaquero.
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.