This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
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I can see you hiking those hokey Wild West mountains,
each peak as fleshless as a death’s head
against another ridiculously blue sky, tilting a dented
World War II army surplus canteen
until a bead of water from Two Medicine River blazes
an icy sod buster’s trail along your carotid
before expiring in the High Sierras of your collar bone…
I’d tell you to be careful, that everything here is lousy
with history, from the first megafaunal
extinctions to those buffalo carcasses rotting in heaps
after the last of our Transcontinental
massacres. I’d say watch out for the antique squalor
of fur trade rubbish, those glaucous
glass beads and rusty axe-heads. I’d warn you about
trailblazers’ despair and cavalry trooper
suicides. Beware the ski lodge and its elk skull trophies!
Pity the gophers poisoned in their holes! Don’t succumb
to history’s penny ante flimflam or time’s
recurrent swindles! But you got out okay. You must’ve
somehow jinked around the failed ambitions
of gold diggers gone broke, their bunkhouses decaying
to splintery grays and birdshit whites
in the foothills where ghosts work their exhausted claims
flitting around the played-out creeks and rattling chains
down at the stamping mill. Bankrupt owners hoo-hooed
in protest when you spelunked their flooded pits
or squeaked the iron wheels of their ore carts. Fractured
projectile points, spent six-shooter brass
and the amber shards of whiskey bottles littered the gulch
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Michael Derrick Hudson lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His poems have appeared in ACM (Issue #36, 2000); Poetry, Boulevard, Columbia, Fugue, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, Triggerfish Critical Review and other journals. He was co-winner of the 2014 Manchester Poetry Prize.
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Joe Lugara took up painting and photography as a boy after his father discarded them as hobbies. His works depict odd forms and objects, inexplicable phenomena, and fantastic dreamscapes, taking as their basis horror and science fiction films produced from the 1930s through the late 1960s. He began creating digital paintings in the 2010s; they debuted in a 2018 solo exhibition at the Noyes Museum of Art in his home state of New Jersey. Lugara’s work has been featured in several publications and has appeared in more than 40 exhibitions in museums and galleries in the New York metro area, including the New Jersey State Museum and 80 Washington Square East Galleries at New York University.
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