In every backyard battlefield,
hordes of half-grown children play,
plaid cowboy shirts tucked into blue denim,
fringe flying, cheeks blazing.
Shoot ’em up, they scream,
each hand waving a silver pistol,
whirling a limp lasso; stolen clothesline tied to the hip.
Lucky ones even had a felt hat, black or brown, piped in vinyl,
held snug with a twisted cord under the chin.
The children of America, bountiful,
they push and bellow in classroom corrals,
stuffed like fenced cattle, led to fatten mindlessly
on the fodder they’re given.
“How the West was won,” the regular meal,
dosed with jimson-weed, chew and swallow.
Chew and swallow into the wretched gullet of human history,
familiar finally, like the bruise bearing witness to contact.
In 1966, shoeless, my hair shorn pixie short,
I ran through the meadow above Big Woods on Lincoln St.,
trailed the path that opened onto school property,
where sloping lawn spread, green, our imagined prairie.
Gene Nash was always the one with the gun,
and you, Anthony, firing in cowboy ecstasy,
your arm an elegant whip, tight and mean.
You argued death.
I was younger, less sure, more willing to please,
the Indian creeping past birches, leaping from stone walls,
screaming like some startled bird, only to clutch my body,
clap my hands onto my bony shoulder, my soft belly,
tumbling downhill as I writhed in cinematic agony.
I died a thousand times, rising from the grassy ground
laughing, alive, unlike those others; Cheyenne, Arapaho,
stilled by Chivington’s order.
Howitzer’s firing, blade-hacked, rifle-shot bodies
covered in blood-soaked earth.
History buried, twice dead.
The blue social studies book proclaimed I did not exist;
removed from the story, elementary education, the United States of America.
Maybe it was all a hallucination, poison in my system.
Maybe it was my blood on the ground at Sand Creek,
my skin scraped raw from the heel of a cavalryman’s boot.
Back then, I always wanted to be the Cowboy, and win.
-Mihku Paul Anderson
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