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July Westhale: American Literature

March 11, 2022 by PBQ Leave a Comment

for Joey 

 
“the silver lamp,–the ravishment, –the wonder–the darkness,–loneliness, the fearful thunder” John Keats
 
There’s a billboard with the route 66’s version of June Cleaver, holding a pie underneath block letters HO-MADE PIES, which is how dry towns get their jollies, I guess. 
 
We buy coffee in cups so thin the joe becomes us and we never regain our human shapes, and I say to you I wonder where they keep the half-bull man and you shotgun back I’ve spent my life asking that like the sharp shooter you are.
 
Who wouldn’t want to be the son of a bull and a damned woman
we are all sons of bull and damn

     you’ve gone West to find everything or me

and look at girls the way I look at girls who are bad for me. Like a desert
through slatternly windows. This is America: the big-pricked statues statuary in their old-growth knowing:

      in the end–spoiler alert–we’re both after the wrong bandit, the bank gets robbed, the two women who should be lovers but aren’t arc their Caddie like a rainbow into the lavish vaginal canyon at the last moment, the whale gets away, Faulkner’s pretend mother doesn’t get the burial she deserves, we have to choose between Liz Taylor in a kerchief or James Dean with his shirt stuttered open, and we can’t—

Filed Under: Issue 101, Poetry 101 Tagged With: July Westhale

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