A Poem by Christopher Salerno

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Cowboying

Someday your lasso will set up
as the mouth of hell and never shut.
A hole in the world’s topology.
Seen anyone coming? Note well
the anaphora of angry clouds
drifting along in the painted sky.

All vanishing points are indefinite.
To die is to have your shadow
removed from the desert floor forever.
Hell might seem overwhelming.
Because there is fire in our hearts
in hell there are probably nothing
but bellows. Great big ones.
On earth there are all the items
leftover from sagas: one is a flip-flop
floating on a puddle. Two is a piece
of tornado hail. Here is a rifle
to write with. We’ll be watching for
the westward trail of its smoke.

Christopher Salerno’s most recent book of poems, ATM, was selected by D.A. Powell for the 2013 Georgetown Review Poetry Prize. Previous books include Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, 2010) and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006), as well as the chapbooks AORTA and Automatic Teller, winner of the 2013 Laurel Review Midwest Chapbook Prize.