| John Jenkinson The Showdown |
Other Poems by John Jenkinson
|
| Tex Morgan stomped into the "Last Dance" saloon, threw the swinging doors wide open and ran straight into a squat, black-bearded hombre with pinched red eyes who smelled like trouble and had the shoulders of a pack-horse. Despite the powerful force of their collision, there was no "opposite and equal reaction"; they stood chest to chest as their iron eyes probed for a seam in the other's leather.
Redeyes sneered, exposing a ridge of diseased gum punctuated by a few stubs of rotten teeth; the curl of his scabbed lip expressed the sensuality of the passive, as the terrified townspeople clawed their way out the back door. He was pliable. Redeyes was there to be invented, in any posture, over and over again, in ejaculatory longing. He was a poststructuralist totally at the mercy of Tex's pleasure. "Bliss is very close to boredom," Tex snorted. He spit a greasy wad of tobacco on Redeye's boots, spun on his silver-spurred heels and sauntered back down the boardwalk, refusing to conform to the easily enjoyed pleasure demanded in a market economy. Redeyes, realizing that this unconscious slide from one kind of unity to another facilitates insight-in-blindness, shrugged his massive shoulders and returned to the now-deserted bar - busted the neck off a bottle of rot-gut Mescal and drained it in one long slug, worm and all. |
|
| John Jenkinson earned his MFA at Wichita State University and his PhD at the University of North Texas. Author of two chapbooks (with a third forthcoming), John recently served as Milton Center Fellow in Poetry at Newman University.
John is a past winner of an AWP Intro Award. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including American Literary Review, The Georgia Review, Grasslands Review, Green Mountains Review, and Quarterly West. John currently teaches literature and creative writing at Butler County Community College. |
|
|
|
|