American Mythic<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He endures:
\nCowboy effinwestian.
\nHe sent a picture of his trailer.
\nI knew what he wanted;
\nI sent him a picture of my Ford F-150.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He added \/writer to his occupation.
\nI added barrel racing to my hobbies.
\nHe changed his font to the same one I use.
\nI set a shortcut to his ad on my desktop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He said the earth beneath his ranch hummed
\nin B flat and that his wind chimes taught themselves
\nto harmonize;
\nsaid his horses cantered in heroic hexameter,
\nand the wolves in his valley howled blank verse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I told him wolves lie,
\nand his horses were anarchist spies,
\nbut I caught a B flat in Jackson Hole once
\nand rode it up the ecliptic into a sky
\nalmost as wide as my longing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I told him I fell outta that big sky
\ninto the divide between men\u2019s minds and spirits,
\nand that if he were so inclined,
\nI could use a hand getting out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I felt him peer at me
\nover the edge of that divide.
\nI did my best to blend into the scenery
\nand waited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Campfire<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Within this aeolian landscape where
\ncowboys and underdogs collect, sorted,
\nsieve-like by the weight of their thoughts,
\nlanding hard enough to knock loose
\nsome tears, salt the plain, the air currents lighter,
\nprancing ahead with other deliveries,
\nhe conjures his subjective self from the
\ncaramelized grit in his cast iron pan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The burden of ego expertly carved
\ninto edible slices, gracefully
\narranged on a battered tin plate extended
\nin her direction, evoking
\na strained benevolence, a d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu,
\nforeign but familiar, that puts a tang
\nof melancholy into every bite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And their sighs fly together with profound
pleasure to savor what was thought extinct,
fueling a most primal connection:
the holy hush of vulnerability;
like blood type O, the unassailable
donor, delivering life just in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regardless of what you might think about cigarettes and the icons associated with them, The Marlboro Man was this woman’s first crush. From there she quickly moved on to any man who was friendly with an apron and cooked in cast iron. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":312,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/tikkho-maciel-zQgsdQvj1IM-unsplash-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/truechili\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}