'you know, the coyotes ate her'
drank her like whiskey
hard against the bright, essential horizon
the cowboys watched hungrily
from a distance
their coughing leather boots
stomping like hooves
as they drank to the end
of beauty

their rugged faces framing
pairs of fierce, dusty eyes
these men are from ghost towns,
and when they met her
she haunted them more than
the ache of old wood
in an empty sky at dusk
or the drunken spill of fiery liquid
down a nicotine throat

she breathed like pele
her skin and knees and breasts
exploding within them
like mothy lightbulbs

she sang of kissing dark-skinned
men of the forest and giving
birth to skinny, cocoa-skinned
children with indigo eyes
and with fevers

she never kissed the cowboys
and shone a knife in the
eyes of the men who
breathed whiskey on her neck
and thighs wantingly

and so they fed her to
a salivating animalistic mouth
to calm the feral tide
as the coyotes spilled rows
of diseased teeth into her
flesh, she hung limp as jesus
dying, swollen meat
at the end of an era