Photo by Ahe Phucho on Unsplash
I’m sweet on you, Sweet Thing, spoke
my presumed great great grandfather
in the third floor hotel room, possibly
nicknamed after some prairie beast,
cleaning a gun, spinning the chamber.
My great great grandmother pushing
aside a lace curtain pretending to look
out on this dusty-ass excuse of a town,
town of faces hidden in hat brim shadow,
town of Apache faces hidden in hands,
town of hardtack as bland as weeks
without a gin rummy partner. She knew
she couldn’t expect a damn thing,
had told him she was as barren as the
arid wasteland he would die in.
Just think if the ocean hadn’t been
there after sprinting across scorching
sand. Welcome to Arizona. I’m driving
through the same dusty-ass excuse of
a town some 122 years later, thinking of
carrion insects falling upon immigrant bodies
lost between countries and the feint of a
homeless man’s hat on a San Diego boardwalk,
it’s color that of fresh blood- Make America
Mexico Again. Then movement from
a third floor hotel room window.
Better to glimpse the ghost in a window
than spend the night in a haunted house.
Then again, every house lived in contains
someone dying and isn’t it more likely it is those
that came before that are haunted by their
progeny’s misdeeds, the disruption of earth,
disregard for life, the repetition of mistakes? I am
hungover again and I forget to call my mother for
her birthday. She will forgive me. She always does.
In the third act, my great great Grandmother
didn’t need a gun. She rode off with the horses
and water supply after he dismounted to piss.
There was no bullet scattered with his sun-bleached
bones, nor casing to excavate. Surely women killed
more of us, too sly for naive sheriffs, lazy historians.
When they say meet your maker, I don’t think
of a surprised cowboy looking up from urine
splashing a termite colony, clumsily tucking
himself away. I don’t think of stumbling mirage
to mirage, thoughts of revenge fading in the
delirium of thirst, or failure to appreciate
the elegance of meteors streaking the sky
like generations of descendants.
Rather, I think of my mother and grandmothers,
the parting of legs for birth, the parting of lace
curtains, the graceful shuffling of gin rummy
cards for solitaire, the construction of plans if or when
a husband arrives home. My great great grandfather
did not and all we know of that period is my great
great grandmother’s description in her journals
of the Primrose Superbloom of 1896, the purple
explosion of ephemerals witnessed from the window
of a train heading back east, her non-writing hand
resting on her belly, something becoming within.
Dustin King would always rather be sneaking a bottle of wine into a movie theater. When that isn't an option, he teaches Spanish and runs a small organization that provides aid to the undocumented community in Richmond, Va. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Ligeia, Tilted House, Autofocus Lit, Blood and Bourbon, and other journals.