Tyson West
Response

Entertaining Your 60s
By Elizabeth Stelling
Inspiration Piece

Do you ever miss the simpler days
one room baggage among crumpled beds

war plots over bad coffee on every street
corner rats played trump cards

when neglectful four in the mornings
dragged on a stack of books

perky rabbit ears waiting in the afternoon
no one cared what your mode of transportation

washrooms are no more
no less than the sculleries they represented

crap piles up; trips to foreign countries, magazines
picked up in airports, trinkets, once gifts

are at odds lying about with little or more sentiment
everything has at least one or more dark secret

within its refuse
showrooms built with coffinesque façade

gloomy corners behind every piece
dark furniture house the lost under

plastic covers, frilly useless pillows
only on termless nights do they speak

the peace.

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Tyson West
Inspiration piece

Just Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
by Elizabeth Akin Stelling
Response

It’s gone quiet this afternoon
like all others on the late
no lasting days of pit-patter rain.
With that, taste is thrown out the window
a home owner displays a rare
long-bodied dachshund throw,
across the back of the couch.

It speaks warm with the sun flowing
across a yellow sofa, and
through the front window.
After a long harsh winter across
the entire us continent.
A welcome site for neutrals zones.

Maybe the family pet meant lots,
so much so, his favorite print
blanket lays beside him.
There is a love for animals
marked across social media,
over nighter stays for the critters,
and it is possible there’s a market

for designer faux man’s best friends.
It screams cuddle up and stay awhile,
and the silence says it all.
Pooper scoopers are a thing of the past.
If the neighbors take a gander,
their likely to dub this place—
a dog-gone no tell motel.

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Elizabeth Akin Stelling
“Bystander”
Inspiration piece

You Can’t Buffalo Me
By Tyson West
Response

Sister Elizabeth, you can’t tell me
You got bison in New Jersey
‘ceping maybe in a couple of your fancy zoological gardens
We got real ranches out here
As raises them
And I done poked a few
But I’m a guess’n you couldn’t call me no buffalopoke for having done so
No over here west of the Rockies
No native herds persist
Mountain men killed off our plateau band
At least a century before the tigers
Went extinct in watermelon sugar
But I got to let you in a little secret
Of this great Columbia of ours
Anything we feel guilty about
We gotta mint on a coin
First coins were liberty heads ideas of freedom
Mostly women while we was a keeping slaves
And not letting them women vote neither
Hell, railroads brought in trainloads of tourists
With sharps rifles to butcher whole bison herds
Leaving their corpses to feed the vultures and coyotes
Then ground up the piles of white bones
For fertilizer to grow the wheat
They milled to give to the Indians on reservations
To give them the sugar diabetes
Sister Elizabeth
The greatest gelt was the buffalo nickel
Got an Indian on one side
And its food nearly driven to extinction on the other
More than one state quarter
Got bison on the back
By the way did you know the word nickel
Come from the German kupernickel
Meaning copper demon?

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Elizabeth Akin Stelling
“Disabled Guardian Angel”
Response

A Call to Souls
By Tyson West
Inspiration piece

The darkened pine grove
On the west bank of the mountain river
Conceals the brick walls
Of the Convent of the Holy Names
Where prostrates the flesh of a woman
Whose veins and arteries
Still retain resilience
And whose mind sculpts
Silences transmitted from a golden box ─
It is this love
That keeps me a prisoner in the tabernacle.
Veiled under the species of bread
And concealed in the small white host
Longing to wash away their sins,
Not in water, but in my blood.
My work rests on nothingness and misery
I will use you
To show that I love misery
Littleness and absolute nothingness ─
To the eternity of clean sheets on which I lay
Next to the sagging skin of a woman bearing
Artificially colored hair
And moods that swing as wildly
As the shades and path of the moon
Puzzled why she must consume my littleness and nothingness
To fly through the window over the abyss of love
Past the third star to the right
Then straight on until morning.

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 Elizabeth Akin Stelling
Texas Has Been Bronzed
Response

Goofy the Baptist
By Tyson West
Inspiration piece

Pluto was decreed a dog
So was Goofy guffawing in the rounds of Ike and Khrushchev
When Tricia and Julie were pulling Checker’s ears
So how come Goofy talked, clipped threads and drove a car.
A miracle!
Uncle Walter—Great good Walter—must have chosen him
To pour the grace of Disney
On the bowed head of Fess Parker
Baptizing him Davy Crockett in the waters of the backlot River Mississippi
So the native kids on the Colville Res
If they had any reception at all
Could hear now and believe later
True stories of Davy and Injuns
How the grey haired good chief got fooled
By Firesticks’ hot blooded lies
Sent the three stooges warriors on the wrong war path
Until Davy and Firesticks waltzed the choreographed knife fight
Where Davy blades the treacherous brave
Whose wounds never bleed his instantaneous death
Like the flash of an atom bomb,
And who looked just like my girlfriend Gina Canale’s Mafia uncle from Youngstown
Only wearing long straight black hair like Gina’s
Except in two braids with a black feather
Gina’s mama made a mean marinara sauce
Then the good grey bumbling chief in his full war bonnet
Would worship Davy
Who had just gutted his third cousin twice removed
He give his word an’ he give his hand, that his Injun friends could keep their land
An’ the rest of his life he took the stand, that justice was due every redskin band
Even when Tinker Bell divaed Jiminy Cricket
To bring her the head of Goofy on a silver platter,
Right before the real Davy
Said “You all can go to Hell—I am going to Texas.”

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Elizabeth Akin Stelling
West Texas Rain and JR
Inspiration piece

Hybristophilia
By Tyson West
Response

You’ve heard of a woman’s glory
Being spent on a “downright cur”
Still you can’t always judge the story
As true, being told by her.
Bonnie Parker “Suicide Sal”

Each crop of young girls comes a new to believe
In the strong arms and soft words of a man
Since I shot my chance to mother
Then spoils their grandchildren
I must possess a throat to speak my words
To keep my voice alive.
No woman bakes biscuits at Endor now
Whose familiar spirit can call me up
Houdini’s wife can’t get no word out of him each Halloween
Since he took that sucker punch
But my true medium twists with you ─ old man on the verge
Of your sixty fifth year signing up for Social Security
Awash with the visions of Baltic blood
And the sins of your self deception.
I weren’t no childish moll who found Clyde by the grace
Of hard fate under the Texas sun
Old man you never picked chain gang cotton
Or cussed a tough Texas sheriff to his face
You sit dreaming here of the weathered out building and 1932 Ford V8 backed in like Clyde used to
To give us a quick get away
Ford V8 like the one we died in
On the Louisiana highway.
Old man keep following the glow on your magic screen
That leads you now to my desires
For the love of a restless man
I’m lucky you too can appreciate my poems
And the Kodak pictures
I never wrote as short or muddy
As Adelade Crapsy
Nor as wild and free as Edna St. Vincent Millay
Nor was any of my photos as neat as Sonya Noskowiak
These ladies here encourage me
To move beyond my juvenilia with Clyde
Still I got to keep talking about him
For he made me as I made him.

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You can’t have too much butttermilk!
By Tyson West
Response 

I Wudn’t Made for Buttermilk Summers
By Elizabeth Akin Stelling
Inspiration piece

We always had chicken and eggs.
“Which came first?” daddy would sing,
then Aunt Myrtle’s rooster would crow
as she served us across the long
wooden table in the side-yard.
I grew tired of poultry, fried,
baked, and fricasseed; it never
tasted so sweet as the first time,
afterward turned my stomach.
“Just rotten” a kid might say.

My preference (still is) the pull
of a pan cooked ham-steak, bone-
in– pineapple juice sucking.
Only if the neighbor butchered
a hog at Christmas, and mamma got
fresh fruit from the farmers market.
“Depending on where you was,
food didn’t come cheap, so eat
what the Good Lord puts on the plate,”
went round the table.

Sittin round, out-numbered
by farm folk didn’t help my cause.
I could accept cornbread, the beans and onions,
on as many fingers a week, as you can count ‘em.
But, the crumbling into the glass
of thick and curdled milk, something
they called buttermilk dippin…geez
my life couldn’t get much worse’er.

My grandparents, today, would cringe
over almond, rice, and soy drinks.
Mammaw was a bit more understanding
in the overturning of modern.
“It don’t do much in the ways
of buttermilk biscuits, can’t change
some things,” she’d roll out
every morning. With grape jam,
fresh from her garden, buttered
and slammed into my mouth.

Every summer we’d slip into
the yard and pick tomatoes, slip
beets from the ground. Juice
dripping from the sides
of your mouth. Red stained
fingers, and dirt under the nails.
But my joy was purple stained
teeth from the concord vines.

I wasn’t afraid to taste, to
speak up against my dislikes,
beat the world in a quiet frowning
sort of way. My grin spoke louder
when my brother would coat
his whiskers in a white
buttermilk kiss, and under-
neath the purple evidence
of picking show’d through.

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Tyson West
Inspiration piece

Outlaw Burt Alvord’s Hidden Treasure
By Elizabeth Akin Stelling
Response

It was all out in the open.
Clear as high noon in outlaw country.
More than his bare bones for all to see.
Burt should’ve read the fine print.
In order to become deputized,
he’d signed his remains over to science.

A quick minute, in 1906,
everything he owned was adrift,
sinking on a horse in sea of sand in Arr-yi-zona.
Wounded by sheriff’s men, thirty and
undercover, off a back railway office
as the 3:10 rolled into town.

Next crucial minute, blood spilt.
Like cold milk hit by unaware elbows.
As he rode swift out’a town
brushing past white ponies
they’d all been painted dead.

He, and Three Finger Jack, played
about as good as two lazy lawmen
up in Cochise.
Ever plead for your life
with a squinty eyed
dusty and dirt riddled snake charming
low down tin star blinding crook?
Greed plays a better hand of poker.

He had lots to be remembering, like
them last steps out, off clear vistas.
And, his last breathe on a cold sunrise.
Images mirrored those jagged tooth ranges,
any could take a bite out’a any
rode rough parcel.
When men like him was bent
leaning heavy and exhausted,
those last miles, hell stretched way beyond,
before southwest desert cacti
could tear him up further,
he smiled. They ain’t got me yet.

His horse kept going. Shoe after shoe,
pressing on deep
sand plopping up behind, behinds jawing.
The wind whipped up devils,
not playing so hard to get gone, the goners
trying to take them both down
where men like he deserved.

Burt thought he had it,
that last laugh, out loud, so everyone
would hear til eternity grabbed hold.
But, the buzzards ate their fill,
every piece of his flesh, including
dried up cotton and boot leather
swallowed up and digested.
However, it wasn’t the end of his road,
rough or not.

Some fool, a soul fetcher fella felt sorry
for his crooked ass. Shouting scripture,
dragged his every bone,
dead bones bleached by heat
its hate for even being, scraped raw by rock
dragged down into every harsh element.
The weight of Burt’s purse sealed the deal.
Enough to make any ferry man rich in rags.

The discoverer, unnamed, wanting
no credit for the bullets still clinging
to fame and thread, let some of the gold pay out
for the bronzing of an anonymous doctor’s
office hanged legend display.
Burt’s dying wish to be famous,
not infamous, played out one last hand,
chains and all.
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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

The back alley behind my Cousin Vinnie’s pizzeria

Smells of grease and malt liquor cans mostly

Occasional the smell of cordite

Mixed with oregano to spice

The blood smearing the filthy cobble stones

Of some fuck up who crossed his capo.

Yeah they got superheroes in the Big Apple

To the east across the Hudson

Yeah, we got crooked cops and Jimmy Burke

Who even if he ain’t paisano

We can still make a deal

But not with the boys and girls in bright colored tights

Who fly over the great granite towers or climb on their sides like spiders

Hell, beating up Sal for just smuggling in a semi of North Carolina smokes

Is beneath their banter and secret identities

Besides the sergeant who makes the arrest

Gotta seize five cartons of Salems for his wife, I mean, as evidence.

Response Piece by Elizabeth Akin Stelling

Is about as useless, as
daddy’s telling their kids
pilgrims loaded their guns
during commercials.
How one horse towns are wastes
of time in the land of the Wild West.

A place that grew many up right.
Its undiscovered treasures
lay buried, still
under weight and guilt of progress.

Dead panhandlers reached right handed,
stripping the silver from rivers
paid for the evildoers hold’em, and
for piano men to play louder.

When bad tastes spit the townfolk
out, into the street
wild fires set the stage for bad acting, and
no mouth didn’t dare speak evil,
because every eye was dry
like Texas dirt.

After the wind rises; on a hot day
in July, lifting plagues from one stop
to another
fast trains moving with big engines
everything is cleaned up.

When Clint, John, and Ford
walk off the screen
another set of trusting kids on the lookout
for war parties
running wild steeds in canyons
said goodbye to empty long barrels
and the last good cowboy.

‘A screen door on a submarine is as usless as a six gun on a stone angel’
Response Piece by Tyson West