December 5-11, 2016: Poetry from ​Graham Fulton and Dan Hendrickson

Raw

Sheridan Wyoming

I open a drawer in Sheridan Wyoming
and find a colourful book of porn
Men and women doing it for real
Men and women doing it for money
Making a living to be alive
Glossy ….stapled
Next to the Gideon
A sex gift left by a previous guest
He ….or she ….probably laughed
as they pictured our faces
goggling in awe
at prime American genital stars
Grand Canyon vulvas
Skyscraping knobs
Maybe it’s been there for years
Maybe it’s been there
since the days
of the pioneers
I turn
a few pages
Ignore the bible
Later
as we finally brave
the life-sapping heat
to sample slaughtered indigenous meat
I hide it in a spare plastic bag
push it into the quietest bin
The republic of flies
and thin crust pizza

We don’t want the ethnic cleaner to think
it was us
who sullied her frontier hotel
We don’t want her judgement
branding the backs
of our twisted Christian Caucasian skulls
We left the porn in the drawer

Los Angeles Plays Itself

The Los Angeles River
runs through my chest.
Most of it has been diced up,
altered and diverted into
makeshift concrete channels.
But there’s a very small section
of it that’s still fairly pristine,
where the waters flow peacefully
and mostly true.
If you could see that portion,
you’d probably think, ‘This is how
all of it must have been, once.’
And you might even be right
about that.
I’m the wrong person
to ask.
That guy’s long gone.
I’m all that’s left.