Postcard to Kay Boyle

Kay Boyle

Palo Alto, California, 1978 or 1979

Postcard to Kay Boyle

Dear Kay,  The Revolution never arrived.

Tonight, far off, flames are singing

to a black sky, a Gaelic god's

shameless indifference.  The half-inspired

novelist-revolutionaries you fed

on Frederick Street are now sixty-something,

glum in Tenderloin hotels stacked with tales

no one will publish.  A few have chucked words

to craft strawberry-scented candles

on the Mendocino coast... and their meth-addled

children hate the patchouli stench of them.

I hope you have forgiven me for using

your letter of introduction to Beckett

to light a turf fire in Donegal.  Kate bakes

brownies as if our kids are still at home.

I spend nights walking toward a fire

maybe fifteen miles across high desert.

God love you, Kay.  Never slack-jawed,

never too weary to insist on marzipan

for every living soul, you were beautiful

as soft Irish rain.  Where you are,

I hope you have settled in with your beloveds,

Joyce, McAlmon, Beckett, and Ernest Walsh...

and that Hemingway is not

there to taunt you.  Love, Red

*  This poem is included in Red Shuttleworth's 2010 poetry chapbook, Drug Store Vaquero (Phoenix: The Basement).

Postcard to Jerry L. Crawford

Playwright Jerry L. Crawford

Postcard to Jerry L. Crawford

Dear Jerry,  We're at the radiant-blood precipice,

tumbleweeds snagged by barb wire.  Yesterday,

as daybreak floated across rock and sagebrush,

someone left a blood-dripping, gut-and-lung shot

coyote in a shopping cart in the Moses Lake

Wal-Mart parking lot.  The cart boy, Brent,

was dispatched to have a look.

It didn't fucking starve to death, he told his boss

before phoning me.  This is not, Jerry,

theatre for castratos of The New Yorker variety.

As I rolled up in my cherry-red Mustang,

chewing tobacco, listening to the Cowboy Junkies,

Brent was laying a couple of large black plastic bags

over the bullet-riddled carcass in the cart.

It caught me in its gaze, Brent whined,

like I was the pimplehead who shot it.

I told him to shut up.  A crowd was gathering.

Then the wind lifted the bags and they spun

off the cart and a clownish girl, with orange hair

and a black dog collar, began dancing.

A guy in the crowd snapped, For Christ's sake,

Nina, we came here for groceries and beer!

So Brent pushed the dead coyote cart

around to the back of the store, dumped the coyote

at the edge of the lake where we buried it

with brand new, soon-to-be-on-sale shovels.

It's a bit like baseball, Jerry:

where the head goes, the body follows.

We're almost over the wall, Red

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

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).