October Issue- Week 4
October 22, 2013
‘Chuck Wagon Eats’– “In my many journeys as a chef: Boy Scouts, trail drives, camp outs etc., I’ve made Hatch Chili Stew, and most recently for a crowd of twenty in the Pine Barrens while hunting down the Jersey Devil.” Managing Editor CPP, Elizabeth Akin Stelling
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JAYHAWKED
Send Kansas to me in a sun shower.
You said you’d come home with a rainbow.
Don’t want fraidy hole siren hook echoes—
or thunder god flashes of ego. I want scissor-
tails clipped to a windshear, to clear me a path
through your switchgrass. No rope-jumping
Jayhawk squawk-tongues in a squall, or campfire
myths hawking ghost rain. I’m that torn-stalk
sunflower you stuck like a pig in a hog wallow
next to a cornfield. I want flag-side-up roses
round a two-story soddie near an artesian spring
in the tallgrass, with a fresh holstein heifer rich
on alfalfa hay staked-out next to a new butter
churn. Or I’ll muster a posse to lasso your ass
to the dilated tail of a wall cloud, and hog-tie
your spurs to a rodeo bull—spinning pirouettes
through a herd of wild mustangs.
Kevin Heaton is originally from Kansas and Oklahoma. He now lives and writes in South Carolina. His work has appeared in a number of publications including: Raleigh Review, Foundling Review, Beecher’s Magazine, The Monarch Review, and Mixed Fruit. His fourth chapbook of poetry, ‘Chronicles,’ was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012 . He is a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets 2013 nominee.
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MEETING UP AT EARL’S
The goldstone glitter of Gallup doesn’t
Begin here, but native vendors
Shine walking through Earl’s Café,
Route 66, offering art with pride:
Sleeping Beauty Turquoise and Kingman,
Zuni Petit-Point, Red Coral, Spiny Oyster Shell,
Lapis, Horse-Hair Pottery, Heishi Beads.
“Silver’s shot,” the Navajo artist says,
“Can’t touch the price so we work
With copper, sell it cheap.”
Spirit-lined woven rugs: as the weaver finishes
The rug, she leaves a white wool thread in the corner
Welcoming dreams of the next rug’s design.
Sumac baskets fetch gas money to travel home.
Animal fetishes and mud pots grace tabletops.
Red and green chili, corn tortillas in
Buffalo pottery and blue water plates.
Warm bread pudding for dessert. Greenthread tea.
We amble outside – vendors sitting at card tables,
Laughing, selling Concho Belts, Dream Catchers,
Cell Phone Charms. “So, where are ya from?”
Elaine Dugas Shea has lived in Montana for several decades, but still misses the ocean. She enjoyed a career in social justice working with American Indian Tribes and civil rights. Her writing is featured in Third Wednesday*, South Dakota Review, *the anthology *The Light in Ordinary Things, *the anthology *Hope Whispers, *Front Range Review, CAMAS, Spillway*, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, the anthology When Last on the
Mountain: The View from Writers over Fifty, Montana Voices Anthology and elsewhere.
February 2013- Week 4
February 25, 2013
The Shooting Star
Midnight splendor
Tell me cowboy,
what was your wish?
Stars shoot first
and ask questions later.
Virginie Colline is a French translator living in Paris. You can read her latest poems in
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*/Paniolo/*
by Clark Crouch
He’s a paniolo
on a volcanic range
minding herds of cattle,
it’s really not so strange.
He’s a paniolo
on these, the lava lands.
He’s a paniolo
far from the beach’s sands.
His ranch is quite ancient
from ‘fore the Texasrange;
from eighteen nine ’til now
there’s been so little change.
His ranch is very large…
puts other spreads to shame;
multi-thousand acres
brings paniolo fame.
His ranch is furtherest west,
and off the continent,
three-thousand miles away
on an isle of content.
There on the mount’nous slopes,
his herds of cattle roam.
He’s a paniolo;
Hawaiiis his home.
Aloha paniolo
on the lava lands.
Aloha, paniolo
METACOWBOY poems by Rodney Nelson
July 6, 2012
Cowboy Poetry Press was given a great opportunity to review Rodney Nelson, METACOWBOY poems, our first book review for June 2012 year, and I’m certainly glad to share…
‘Rodney Nelson confesses a separation from poetry until 2000, writing and publishing fiction; when he returns ‘The cowboy and the Deadwood gambler and the Tombstone gunslinger are legendary,” he says. “The working cowboy lives on, but so does the metacowboy, without lariat or gun or poker deck and wearing strange boots.”… Rodney Nelson is a traveler and hiker on his native Great Plains and throughout the west…’ (Taken from the back jacket)
I had not heard the term ‘metacowboy’ until I laid eyes on this book. It is a great title and opportunity for me personally as the editor to get a glimpse into a modern day cowboy’s boots. Maybe hiking boots in Rodney’s case. Only beginning the cowboy poet genre recently, I confess my own hunger for modern artistic views on old western life and hardship. Indeed Nelson has given me just what I wanted.
His voice and fantastic use of language throughout the pages are alone enough to draw you in.
In Rest Stop Big Horn Country– without reprinting the whole I can attest, you are tourist driving along and taking in monuments and sites, we’ve all done it; then the cavalry appears, and help you really experience the long weary drive.
His movements in word and throughout line have you right beside, and ready…yet onto another page, and you are moved just as easily by another. Rodneys modern verse; it will swing you, reminding, life is not so far off from our past, just easier to swallow as we get older.
Another site (Dry Crik Review) uses this poem below to show us how he uses pauses and last words- expressing the poets feeling of loss which ends with humor, but I like the sadness which clearly sets the tone, and pulls you in…
Yuma Hat
When I lived in smoke heat on the Clearwater of
Idaho I knew that the river would exhale
into my late evening rooms if I opened them
but now I am in the dog days on the Red of
North Dakota and the water will be hot as
afternoon all night
why do I walk out along
the bike and in-line skating path when I could have
oak shade...
I admit a dislike for overtly ostentatious reviews, and shouldn’t have to use fancy words to persuade you to venture into longing- into Rodney”s Montana and Wyoming and other plains. His portrayal of the Badlands and as I said earlier, his use of language gives us a glimpse into the roughness of the old and new west in sound and scenery, making much of his poetry authentically cowboy. It has shown me paths he himself has taken. I want to visit these places, and write my own history now.
He is truly a kindred cowboy on a metahorse, and into sunset we shall ride.
EAS
METACOWBOY: poems. By Rodney Nelson. (2011. The Moon Publishing and Printing The Moon) 34 pp. $14
cowboypoetrypress 