at the grave of John Wesley Hardin By Brad Maxfield Two tourists pose for the camera, turning their fingers to guns while flashing menacing smiles, ready to become, in their minds alone, quick-draw artists, poised at noon for a show-down with a cartoon desperado. In their version, bullets are bees streaking toward crimson blossoms of old world roses, becoming wounds in the paper skin of a no-good, vicious hombre. At their feet, a wiry mutt gnaws thorns from its paws, in the pain it collected as it ran, or sometimes limped ahead, the mongrel guide that led them, like so many more before, to this spot. Neither simple nor pure—even the dog forgot which injury to fake, changing with every couple of breaths which foot to hang for sympathy as it stumbled along like a wounded drunk just counting on a piece of the picnic before trotting off to leave tourists in peace in the far east corner of the graveyard— where a monument to a killer, a national shrine, is well- preserved not twenty paces from a wall, behind which, goat-weeds overwhelm the flat, black stones which quietly speak Chinese—with democracy’s heavy accent. |
Brad Maxfield’s first book, For All We Know, was published by Backwaters Press in Omaha, NE. He has an MFA from the University of Oregon. After teaching in Oregon, Idaho, Texas, and Ecuador, Brad has settled in eastern Oregon where he lives, teaches, and writes.