Postcard to Julie Jensen

Playwright Julie Jensen

Postcard to Julie Jensen

Dear Miss Julie,  Gust of arctic wind and I shamble

into an all-night roadside cafe.  My casual seizures

of inappropriate rage or amusement are twenty years

north of Vegas and Red Rock.  In one booth

a couple of kinds are mutually glazed

with denim 'n leather seduction.  Up the aisle

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 a gooey

fried egg, 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 know the bump

of this country.  Love, Red

*  This poem is contained in a 2010 Red Shuttleworth chapbook, Drug Store Vaquero (Phoenix: The Basement).