No Name
Atlantic, Iowa
Bird Syntax
Dear Thano
New Hopes†
Bric-a-Brac
Doorbell Press
Contact
Wigleaf, 2025
I.
Custer’s Last Ride
In the observation-car six women stood at the window waving to a man racing down the access road in a red corvette. He blew them kisses and they blew them back. It went on—too long—tens of minutes—waving and kissing and driving—until the corvette turned into the corn and the kisser turned to her friends and sighed “Oh, Bill,” giggling, and ushered the group toward their seats. Custer eavesdropped, twirling his mustache. Then he moved on to bigger things. The outriding Rockies were rising on the horizon like molars at the back of the world’s mouth, ready to chew, and he felt called forth a strength to regard as small the objects of his natural concerns: property, health, and life, just like Kant said he should. In the fields the men were burning piles of something—tires, maybe—and Custer sat there, regarding as small those objects, watching the flames like many little suns settling into the darkness. He thought about his mother, then about home. Come dark he was still seated, looking hard into the blackness, as his eyes adjusted to something else: it was the half-remembered image of telephone wires at night, as when the lines had first begun to sing, and the Lakota rode along beneath them, hacking at the poles with axes and knives, until Custer came to stop them, and, for a time, did.
II.
Crazy Horse Lightning Round
For millennia pronghorn had to jump no higher than sagebrush. All the pronghorn in the fields that morning, as every morning, with the sun rising over their antlers, were on hands and knees, digging under fences. From above God was considering his work. As dawn broke across a thousand dew-slick windshields, He counted the baseball diamonds (8) and the above-ground pools (∞) and lamented His flightless terrier pronghorn. Crazy Horse paused in the parking lot. Then he stepped inside. At the door a man handed him a sport-fishing guide filled with fish he had never seen before—fish drawn in profile, as if set on a table beneath him—as though he were God, out in the parking lot, watching the dreams of sleeping truckers. Crazy Horse mouthed the names as he walked: “brown trout, rainbow trout, golden rainbow trout.” He mouthed them past the deli and bakery (“…largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, spotted bass, striped bass…”), the cereals and dried fruits (“…bluegill, walleye, muskellunge…”). He mouthed them all the way to the dairy aisle, where a miracle silenced him. The lid on an egg carton was flapping up and down behind the freezer glass. He thought about Artaud. What do the eggs signal through the flames?, he wondered. “That is why pronghorn are not buried,” God replied: “their spirits dig back up.”