John Macker

Cerrado

Listening to Mingus' Gunslinger Bird
in the living room when I heard a loud thump
coming from her studio. She was on the floor
holding her bent Quasimodo wrist. As ugly a
break as I'd ever been to. She had slipped and
landed on her hip and hand. She went briefly
into shock and stared at the ceiling.
She didn’t recognize me as her husband
thought I was playing live music from somewhere
in the Five Points of her imagination. After she
came around she swore the darkness tried to
close in around her. I took her to urgent care
on a hot smoky night, the drowse of August.
They determined she'd need surgery. They
determined older people slip and fall, right
before we begin to fade away.
We are too old to be gunslingers. Bird died at 34.
The nights closed in on him like carnivorous angels.

She now holds her bandaged wrist above her heart
and walks with a cane. Life doesn’t feel precious, it
resembles an open wound we spend a lot of our time closing.
Wildfire smoke fills the air, the sun has turned orange.
Another man of color shot in the back.
Who doesn't want to close the book on this grievous year?
Who hasn't gone into shock, eyes filled with ash?

Today, I played music so loud it emptied the neighborhood
of life as we know it. But it gradually returned.
The silent ambulance mercifully left the cul-de-sac
without the sick lady across the street.      Victor brought
in his recycling bin. I read: some words die in cages.
I thought about what breaks us, what mends us, the border,
separations. What closes our hearts for good.
I thought about hair trigger America,
how smoke is the summer language of ghosts.

John Macker grew up in Colorado and has lived in northern New Mexico for 25 years. He has published 13 full-length books and chapbooks of poetry, 2 audio recordings, an anthology of fiction and essays, and several broadsides over 30 years. His most recent are Atlas of Wolves, The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, (a 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist), Desert Threnody, essays and short fiction, (winner of the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards fiction anthology prize),  El Rialto, a short prose memoir and Chaco Sojourn, short stories, (both illustrated by Leon Loughridge and published in limited edition by Dry Creek Art Press.) For several years, he was contributor to Albuquerque’s Malpais Review. His one-act play, “Coyote Acid” was produced by Teatro Paraguas in Santa Fe in early 2022. He lives in Santa Fe with his wife Annie and two dogs.