After Your Last Poker Hand, You Bought Cocaine and a Pistol
- After Your Last Poker Hand, You Bought Cocaine and a Pistol
Your death splattered across us like flecks of Pollock,light-blue, and you never heard your blood hit the ground.
Your little brother is growingdark flowers for you in the organic gardenof himself. He sees you as the shadowof a scarecrow he is never able to recognize,revolving every time he tries to face it,but somehow, always left with a blank pillowcasewhere the head should be.
They found you ten miles from a casino in Nevada.The blood in your hair had coagulated to the texture of styling gel.No coyotes. No muskrats or vultures.
The hiker who called the police talked to himself and flipped a coin.
I keep thinking that the last thingyou saw was a cactus.They say cacti can go years without water.They say people with bipolar disordercan go years without an episode.
Today it rained in the canyon.
Was the sky purple last night? That is my favorite kind of sky.
The desert, hollow:Birds making bird noises.Sand blowing through an exit wound. [End Page 111]
Adam Love is an emerging writer from Salt Lake City. New work is upcoming or appears in Danse Macabre, The Missouri Review, Revolver, Sugar House Review, Atticus Review, Metazen, Main Street Rag, among others. He’s the author of the the chapbook, Another Small Fire (Tired Hearts Press 2013). He runs the Literary Arts portion of the Utah Arts Festival. In his free time, he’s in between surfing the Pacific Ocean or exploring the mountains and western rivers of Utah.
