My face card only declines at bars south

of the river. Something about my slant-like

eyes makes ‘em all think I’m just one bad day

away from eating their dog, downing

that poor chained-up chump in a single

sorry gulp. Can somebody tell this brute boot

that I’m the real fuckin’ deal? Can you bring me

my mud-stamped papers? And if those don’t work,

then my God-given gun? It’s true, I shoot. This gun’s

got rabbit pelts for bullets. Now be smothered

in a choking softness. Fuck a bar and a bouncer.

It’s been more than forever since I had y’all over.

Let’s be porch props, silhouettes sat on folding chairs,

the single yellow light. Have your summers been unspooling

as slow as mine? Before you answer, sides lanced into water,

let me pour you two fingers of spirit for the big hit. A pillar

of smoke on the side. If Jesus saves, consider me nowhere close

to being canned and in the pantry. If life begins at conception,

consider me swearing since that first cellular division.

Shoot. I called 1-800-TRUTH, no shit I did, twice a day

for seven years and nobody picked up. Tell me, are you

the same? Shh, stay awhile, have another golden flask

of ghosts and gardens. Closer. Let me tell you something.

The roadside porn stores are inevitable and shambling

and somewhere in the aisles I’m being fed my daily

quarters. Give me my metallic wafer with red wine to wash

it down and I’ll do my best slitted, slender-dress dance.

When I’m done it’s another twenty and your trust

for a kiss. Enough people told me I was femme

and fatal and finally I believed them. But let’s get

this straight: if I’m yours, you’ve got to admit

I’m American: my own best weapon, my own worst

confession. I can even be your wife for a season.

I’ll take you sledding in the hilly graveyards

like I did when I was nineteen and still seamless.

I’ll slot your body between my knees and lean back

‘til gravity takes us, and takes us, and takes us,

but before we go down, one last admission:

I really do believe that the dead lie tilted

beneath the ground, bodies following

the earth’s curve, their arms folded for a sleek, inertia-

prone profile. We can go where they go, you got it baby,

just wrap me round your shoulders like a mother-

made scarf and for the love of all things holy, hold the hell on.