Red Shuttleworth: Three Poems from the Bone-Dry West

Photo by Red Shuttleworth, 8 July 2015

Before the Hand of

Spilled beer and Jesus-platitudes,
road-twisted cheap-brass rodeo trophy buckle...
And the pickup rattles... fencing tools and crushed beer cans.

Red wildfire-sun,
three roadside crosses in one downhill mile,
illegal burn barrel with a smokin' garden hose....

It's a drought-year nothin'.
Just sit sullen on a padded oak rockin' chair...
fire a nickel-plated seven-inch Colt revolver,
all the .45 rounds you can afford, into a neighbor's
center pivot section of gene-combo corn.

Before the Hand of: Red Shuttleworth, from Poet Red Shuttleworth, 8 July 2013

Photo by Red Shuttleworth, 14 July 2015

Collapse of Stacked-Up Details

You dream rattlers...
drinking caffeine-rich soda pop
from your dog's stainless steel supper bowl.

Dry grass... wildfire-weeks...
you quick-buy a nebulizer.

The Wolfhound wants to sit
for a strip of old-style photo booth portraits...
wants you to plunk the last car-change
quarters into some chewing-gummed slot.

A best friend drops into a diabetic blackout
while driving home with Chinese take-out,
crashes into a parked dildo-Lexus... totals it.
Not much later comes the small stroke...
loss of vision in the left eye...
the one that best saw a ninety-plus
baseball coming 60-feet from the bump.

Blue haze... mourning doves
forever in nonlinear time and space...
wildfire smoke and bird-screech.

Age seventy's residue....
You're just another dust devil.

Collapse of Stacked-Up Details: Red Shuttleworth, fromPoet Red Shuttleworth, 14 July 2013

Photo by Red Shuttleworth, 12 July 2015

The Core of Our Moon is Iron

Miles traveled are points in the game of mistakes.
The sun rises bronzy... soon turns brimstone-yellow.

The little faces the sky makes jiggle and jump...
and it's a joke for some dry-humor god.

And within recall:
the rumble of fractured bottom ground,
rock climbing rock to new elevation.

Lily skin, lavender shawl, tight greenish jeans,
Go... we should go somewhere. She also said,

Nobody really feeds the heart-sprawled...
certainly not little banjo players. On the corners.

You sit, flask of bourbon-water: the sun thrill-rises sulfuric
through basalt dust and grass-fire, sagebrush smoke.

The Core of Our Moon is Iron: Red Shuttleworth, from Poet Red Shuttleworth, 12 July 2013