Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

She’s wearing tight Wranglers
and scuffed cowboy boots
and when she finishes knocking
back a shot of tequila, she nods at me
and asks if the seat next to me is taken.
I shrug, do an invisible roll of the eyes,
and bite my tongue. We are the only
two customers in this redneck bar.
She’s stridently pretty
in a Plains-weathered way.
She wants to know why
I’m drinking non-alcohol beer.
How do I tell her I don’t want sex
nor do I wish to take confession.
I’m only talking to her because
I have no one to pound
my back with BenGay.

BenGay on my back.
Vicks on my chest.
Baby oil on my privates.
Clean sheets and weekly
mashed potatoes and gravy.
I desire only simple things.

But she’s too simple.
She’s really quite pretty
in a hard-knock rez way,
but she won’t shut up,
says her boyfriend in the county
jail threatens suicide unless she
visits him every day and
the fat, red-faced bartender
is clocking her out of the corner
of his imperial blue eye and
Cowturdville does not tolerate
drunken Indians at all.
I need her hands, not
her mouth, but soon
my own mouth is
mincing words,
incantations of
purported innocence.
The great withered snake
of loneliness between my legs
is stirring, lost in beige sand
between dream and waking.
No, no, no, I won’t do this.
I buy her another shot and leave
my lust in a lurch. Doksa, I say.

Inside the sanctity of my battered LTD.
the futility of my near miss is palpable.
I decide to drive to Chadron.
There’s this electric massager
I saw in Wal-Mart last week.
Its handle is shaped like
a boomerang so the user
can hit every spot on his back.
I’m going to buy me one
and worship and writhe at
the high church of electricity
like a Frankenstein of the Plains.