Gold Country Western, or This is Not an Ode to My Distant Relative, Jesse James

by Meg Kim

---

In which I tumbleweed, bite off a piece 

of narrative not mine using the overlarge 

front teeth of my American ancestors, carried 

by the DNA of my grandma, which passed

through her one bedroom schoolroom in Grass Valley, 

and sticky as debt followed her to Asia 

and back again, where it sprouted from my jaw

to sing the singed plains. For once, let me be less 

eldest, more lawless. Let me become 

a steel smile and laughter tearing ragged 

all my sentences.


*


This is the scene in which I pace a count of ten:
now cut to a dustpan of a town, tired wives, weathered 
miners, grasshoppers falling like rain before the harvest, 
pulpits built crooked, cards changing places, whiskey
changing the words in the air to match what writhes 
in the hearts beneath. Somewhere near the ribs of the long-
gone bison a shelter through which wind gets in, 
its ceaseless lyricism forgetting every blood-soaked 
synonym. Watch me stride with my warped shadow 
through this corridor of the west, these hollowed hills. 
Watch me lone and lit in the treacly glow.


*


Not an ode but a confession:
I too have been pistol, Peacemaker in white 

fists. I angle my eyes, slant my hat, approach the outlaw 
my family from behind to offer up my fast-drawing hands 

because the Other in me is tired of being small. She wants 
to expand so fast you don’t see it until you’re staring 

down the barrel as if standing at the mouth of a tunnel 
in a mountain where railroads were birthed from stone, 

laborers stifled and silent in every snapshot. She wants 
to take and take and take. It does not matter from whom. 

---

Meg Kim is a poet from Southern Oregon currently based in Chicago. Her debut chapbook, INVISIBLE CARTOGRAPHIES, is forthcoming with New Delta Review, and her work has appeared in Sycamore Review, Ninth Letter, and The Adroit Journal, among others.