“Ricochet” by Howie Good
Literature, Poetry1 I want to live in the Old West that never existed. Leave the bottle, I’d tell the bartender, though a black halo of buzzards hangs over the town. I’d lean my back against the bar and count at least a hundred bullet holes in the card players and then discover a new kind of outlaw hideout when I took the laughing saloon girl upstairs.
2 I’m in two places at once, in our bed and in her dream. The hangman places the black sack over my head. Why did the cowboy have to die on the bridge, light shining on every available surface?
3 Charismatic exploding lion, monstrous in her beauty, she sees a glimmer of something no one else does. Hope is an obsolete word. The six Indians leave. People kill for the same reasons bridges fail.