“This Guy” by Dale Champlin


This guy

was sitting on top of our dog fence looking in at me in my bedroom!
I was tying on my trainers with the broken shoelace and listening to NPR
but I really wanted to be bingeing Norwegian serial killer shows on Netflix.
I remember the light was that toxic blue they’re always warning you about
oozing from your iPhone. “Don’t look at the screen if you want to sleep at all tonight!” But it was morning and the guy looked friendly in spite of his four-day stubble
and the fact that I couldn’t imagine he was on the up-and-up. I could see his worn out Carhartt’s, steel-toed boots, and rheumy eyes. Living way out here in the boonies
I was surprised that anyone could find my singlewide. I knew the no trespassing signs posted down by the gravel turnoff were no deterrent. Charlie moved out a year ago
and took our two dogs, the all-terrain, the pickup and two pounds of pot with him.
“Good riddance,” I say. Sure, I’ve started talking to myself way out here in the middle
of nowhere. Charlie left the axe whacked deep into the stump out there in the weed bed—
what used to be my garden. A few sunflower seeds managed to sprout came up about crotch level, them and some sprigs of thyme and mint. An out-of-season elk
left strung up in the woodlot stopped stinking a while back. Last fall a bear
made short work of its haunches but the antlers still look fine.

Even if my life is either a soap opera or a whodunit, the guy doesn’t give me the creeps. Maybe he should. I start on my run out past the no hunting sign marking the edge of my property, gravel all the way to where the curve widens into heat-cracked asphalt. Beargrass clots the bar ditch. Frogs croak in the murky bottom. Ten miles and I haven’t even broken into a sweat. I pass the homestead cemetery. Tombstones tilt. A chipmunk spreads his picnic of pinecone petals on one granite block. A moss-covered angel
kneels over a pioneer baby’s burial.

I turn around at the burned-out gas station; the Mobile Pegasus long stripped of its neon halo and a good half of its paint. Weeds poke up though cracks around the pump. I head back. Vermillion sunlight flashes sparks through dark branches.

My pace slows as I sidle near the mired trailer. The guy has moved closer to my front door. Now he’s crouched on the torn vinyl van seat Charlie used to sit on to clean his shotgun. I notice my “home” is looking none the worse for wear. Green mold creeps up the aluminum siding and even though I stuffed the bullet holes in the windows with aluminum foil, I can see cracks radiating like spider webs.

Up close the guy loses some of his friendly aspect. I wonder what he wants.

I try not to swear but all I can think to say is, “What the fuck are you playing at?” A fat tear springs from under one wrinkled eyelid and trickles through his whiskers.

Maybe he’s harmless after all.


Ever since Dale Champlin’s daughter married a bull rider she’s been writing cowboy poems. From her early days hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota to the bleachers at Pendleton Roundup, summers camping at Lake Billie Chinook, Dale’s poetry has been imbued with the smell of juniper and sage. In 2021 her poetry collection, “Callie Comes of Age” was published by Cirque Press.

“Cowboys and Coffee” by Dora Robinson


I watch the drought blitz through ranches, soil so fed up
it leaves without giving notice. I stop for gas, scrape off
layers of bugs splattered and smeared across my windshield.
I pour myself a cup of coffee, thick as the first oil that shot up
from Spindle Top. I take a seat next the window, dust
on the glass make folks going by look like etch-a-sketches.

Two old cowboys sit in a booth next the cash register.
They sip shots of double espresso and poke fun at their ailments:
busted bones screwed into plates they declare need a good oiling.

“Time was,” one said, “that you could hear sorghum and wheat shoots
hum like love-sick prairie dogs. Now you can’t hear anything except
the sun drilling down like a scorpion stinging the fields with its sun baked tail.

“By the time my wells played-out,” said the other, “the fields weren’t
even hospitable to noxious thistles or bindweed. I watched silver tanker
trucks leave with my profits as creditors arrived with their due bills.

The cowboys ordered another round of espresso. I left wondering
if there was such a thing as a manual that told you how to dismember
your ranch before it foreclosed or ways to pray to end the drought
before your sanity blows away with the dust.


Dora Robinson was raised on an Appaloosa breeding ranch in Southern Wisconsin.
Many of her poems are inspired by her respect and appreciation for the landscape and and people of the Great Plains. Her poems have been published by The Texas Poetry Calendar, Rio Review, Edge and other publications. Her poems, “Ghost Town” and “Toad and Badger will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Coal City Review.

“Stand-off at the Ok Cutlery Corral” by Kate Meyer-Currey


In the badlands of the risk-assessed
medium-secure unit dining room cutlery
is a weapon threat.

It’s dangerous in them there hills: the Sheriff’s posse patrol the endless prairie of the ward, in pursuit of ‘Wanted’ cutlery.

They don’t want to be scalped in a patient raid, by sharps from the therapy kitchen.

Every mealtime is a death-defying standoff between boredom and hunger.

It’s staff versus the Cutlery Gang, who plot like ageing shootists in their locked drawer hideout.

These old-timers have the edge over us. They define true grit, their wits sharpened by years of wrestling hospital food.

We are just dude-ranch cowboys with our Spaghetti Western cardboard sandwiches.

High noon and it’s lunchtime.

Staff are on battle-stations, serving-spoons cocked, as gunslingers swagger to the dining queue.

Sometimes, shootouts occur; plates ricochet and we retreat behind the serving-hatch in a hail of pea-shrapnel.

Today, however, it’s a truce: the peace-pipe is a supervised vape in the town-jail yard.

But the natives are still restless, poised like marmots when vultures circle overhead.

The Sheriff is on high alert for suspicious E-Cig smoke signals: there’s still tea and supper to come.


Kate Meyer-Currey works in forensic mental health needs a dark sense of humour to survive. This poem is for her Old Timer patients, who can’t stand plastic cutlery (but still might use real metal to scalp the staff).