MARVIN SHACKELFORD
We Got Together and Talked About Redheads
Sometimes the flower breaks blue
and
open under the sun and I
kiss it,
I kiss it like I mean it,
and its mean taste showers
battery acid. My throat.
Alkaline is the taste of blood.
But only in this plant world
it’s fine, a natural
response
to nonbiologic stimulus.
No, no—the angry petals
are
full of green,
fully greened
and never wanting
for water.
Lips of the parts
hidden in folds
and unnamable
for me,
shit. I guess
if
I was painting
this would be brilliant.
The flower would be brazen
and all over its nighttime
releases
I
wouldn’t taste the way
love trickles and tricks
its way free of being
love.
by Jason Polan
Old Mountain Cat
Her voice
takes a tilt of
whiskey
and the dance floor dips
us again, press of her body soaked
through my shirttails
She’s determined to run me
with the old mountain cat
of her thighs, and I’m inclined
to agree it’s bad luck--
we could have had something.
In her car the radio fills
with
fish, fossils
she’s ignoring, I’m denying,
and the field she drives us toward
is
a motel room in reverse,
the parking lot that flanks
any
careful funeral home.
We twist hands, slit in her arms
like
loud roses in a silent parlor.
How I tell love it’s love,
and then it’s gone.
Staccato
You tried to convince me
wise nightclub managers
refuse air conditioning on purpose:
It
sells more liquor in
summer.
But that wasn’t the end of the story.
You had to show
me how
flexible you are on your feet,
stoned like the neon fixture of a promise
that lying
liquid is your true
skill.
It wouldn’t have mattered
if you danced
all
night, let your breasts
shimmy out of the slim top
you insist you need in the heat.
I’d
still feel the hollow
staccato
of time signatures
overhead,
and when your steps slowed you’d hear
the thrum of the ages, too, and regret
the
nakedness of this conversation.
BIO
MARVIN SHACKELFORD holds an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Montana. His stories and poems appear in such journals as Cimarron Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Confrontation, Southern Poetry Review, Armchair/Shotgun, and Kestrel. He resides in the Texas Panhandle and earns a living in agriculture.