August 21st, 2009
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Paul Zarzyski
“THE CAR THAT BROUGHT YOU HERE STILL RUNS”
—Richard Hugo, from Degrees Gray in Philipsburg
It takes more than gasoline and gumption
to get you to Zortman—more
than whimsy or a wild inkling
to rekindle history. It takes a primal prairie
need, a kinship with Old Man Winter, with Napi
hunkering in sunless gulches, a longing
for short Fourth of July parades, the bestkept-
secret-café with a waitress
who commutes 50 miles from Malta—
big city with its 5 p.m. rush
minute, she quips. Pavement—purt-near
all the way to the corrugated last
half mile into work—
through herd after mule deer herd,
excites her. What can anyone say in words
that Charles M. Russell has not
narrated in paint. Little Rockies, Larb Hills,
predator versus prey versus wind
still give this Indian-cowboy
landscape its animation.
Your eggs
jiggling over-easy, hashbrowns crisp,
roughcut slabs of real ham,
one pancake seat-cushioned over its own plate
(whole wheat toast sold out last month
to hot-shot fire crews), are all grilled
just right. The coffee, vintage-grind,
is brewed with water so mineralthick,
it’s panned first,
then filtered. Same goes for the décor—
local art collaged with faded Russell prints
above faux-brick wainscoting.
Lucky—
the 11 a.m. lull all to yourselves—
you are, for once, simply where you need
to be. Do not ponder why. Do not
ask the waitress what brought her here
from Seattle. The wall clock is not
locked in neutral. Thus, you better be
willing to revel in this living limbo,
this muffling of drumroll death. Muse
over your food. Ruminate,
while chewing, on each tooth’s name—
incisor, canine, bicuspid, molar—
salute the taste buds, bitter to sweet,
as you clean your plate, pony up,
inch your way out of town
with a groan—heartstrings taut
as lariats stretched to whatever rogue
lodestar pulled you into this
still-shot of Montana past, grass
ropes strained to their organic max,
aching to hold for only so long.
For Dick
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
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August 18th, 2009
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Larry D. Thomas
STEERS IN SUMMER, LOWING
Against a backdrop of blue heaven
and mesas hot as blacksmiths’ anvils,
still stunned by the musk of men
who castrated them as calves,
they blanket the bleak range
like an unrolled scroll of reddishbrown
parchment scrawled with a savage
calligraphy of horns. Tails lash
hides so sunstruck they’re tanned
alive on racks of ribs
guarding hearts and the grand
bellows of lungs. The nubs
of grass they grind with giant molars
are but straw they burn to fuel
their hellfire breath. The lavenders
of the evening ahead are cool
foreshadowings of their fate
of cold storage lockers on whose dim
hooks they’ll sway as sides of meat,
drooling the mouths of those who fed them.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
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August 16th, 2009
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Jeff Streeby
SHEEP KILL
for Dave
David, for years lost in drug-fogs, opens the throats of stunned lambs.
After half his life, grown patriarchal, he puts off all Armour’s gear—
safety helmet, goggles, apron, gauntlet, rubber boots, all their iron mesh and leather.
Shirtless, his Old Dominion baseball cap backwards,
he stands in cut-off Levis and sandals, prelate of the prostrate flocks,
singing each gashed fleecy neck some private sacrament or psalm.
Snugly grottoed in his windowless room, he moils away
smoothly stoned, ankle-deep in blood at the foot of the trundling conveyor,
his face pacific but spotted and striped with the dark wine of slaughter,
his torso, too, streaked incarnadine, splashed with arterial spray.
Year after year, he regards the slow ascent of his bleeding sheep
as they are carried off on wide black belting that rises through his ceiling.
Carotids bubble, jugulars weep, blood runs down the dull rubber in sticky ribbons
that glow honey-gold under long florescent lamps flickering in the basement’s dinge.
Mild berserker, smiling or whistling, he hones his blade against its sharpening steel,
makes it scrape and ring there until it is slender as a Hittite queen and irresistible.
One morning, as ordained, Dave wakes into the blizzard of an empty TV.
Too lucid, he finds he is unable to remember what day of the week it is or
what has happened to that ’58 Chevy Belair he drove in high school, or
whether his married sister is dead or alive.
Unable to explain to his stained self its solitude or
to name with certainty that gray face that looks out of the bathroom mirror or
to confront his other gigantic burden-all those years of pointless doing—
he panics, leaving little behind.
That night, under the doormat of all places, his sister found the knife,
its well-worn haft polished black with blood and suint,
its long edge dressed and keen.
She was furious when she found him in the basement,
a step-ladder in easy reach,
his toes just brushing the floor.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
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August 13th, 2009
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Laurence Snydal
AUTHORITY
When Norman sent me for the cows
I couldn’t bring them in. They stood
As if they had all day to browse
The short grass down, as if they could
Graze all the way to China. When
I hollered, some of them would swing
Their huge heads round and stare and then
They’d swish and stamp and blink to bring
My eight years into focus. Damn!
I had to go and get the dog.
And everything I think I am
Still sees them file out of the bog
Down by the stockpond, up the hill,
Back to the barn, the dog behind,
And I behind the dog. I still
Remember how he made them mind.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
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August 11th, 2009
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Red Shuttleworth
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 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.
–from Rattle #30, Winter 2008
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