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).