in North Dakota close to where Crow Indians
once waged germ warfare on another tribe
by swapping intentionally-tainted elk meat
for three lascivious squaws. Please don’t ask me
how or if I’d block our neighborhood rag man’s
flight to Acapulco, for he never swiped one thread
of my fabric, and looking back on things,
I know he had beaucoup opportunities.
The second of the squaw trio must have been
a mathematics whiz: how else explain
the out-size portraits of Leibniz and Newton
she kept precariously propped against the far-side
of her teepee? And it just came in on the radio news
that our rag man purchased the fading portraits
of Leibniz and Newton in Guatemala City
from some curbside vendor on market day.
Yeah, I tend to agree with you our rag man
is probably ignorant of the Crow, their shady use
of rotten elk, or the three hot babes they bargained for,
though he’s quoted as saying he now has in place
a failsafe regime to calculate true market value.
___
The Poet: William C. Blome is a writer of poetry and short fiction. He lives in-between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he is a master’s degree graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His work has previously seen the light of day in such fine little mags as The Commonline Journal, Amarillo Bay, Prism International, Laurel Review, The Oyez Review, Orion headless, Salted Feathers, and The California Quarterly.
The Poet: William C. Blome is a writer of poetry and short fiction. He lives in-between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he is a master’s degree graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His work has previously seen the light of day in such fine little mags as The Commonline Journal, Amarillo Bay, Prism International, Laurel Review, The Oyez Review, Orion headless, Salted Feathers, and The California Quarterly.
The Artist: Loren Kantor is a woodcut artist living in Los Angeles. You can find more of his work at woodcuttingfool.blogspot.com
