When the band segues from “Cupid”
to “Chain Gang,” I stop dancing.
My hip hurts & I feel foolish, doing 
the two-step to “Hoh! Ah! Hoh! Ah,” 
the sound of the men working 
on the chain gang. You keep dancing, 
raising an imaginary pick ax over your head
on each “Hoh!” & striking on each “Ah!”
Love, for a shy girl, you don’t sweat
much, meaning I love how you don’t sweat
being judged.  I sit down to my bottle
of flat beer, dreading tonight, knowing
I’ll get up between nightmares six
or seven times to pee.  Here comes
“Mustang Sally” & I slice a forefinger
across my throat,  which means
“I’m dead, love.  Let’s go home.”
                        

He’s addressing the nation on CNN.
How do you know he’s lying?  His lips
are moving.  The joke was funny,
four years ago.  Now, we shrug,

at a loss for words.  Dante damned
corrupt politicians to the Eighth Circle
of Hell, Stone Ditch Number Five.

Even a singing cowboy, back
in the imaginary day, knew he’d
have to “slap leather” if someone
called him a liar.  Today, “liar”

means something between 
a hobby & a vocation.  Lord, 
shut his mouth, make him go 
away.  We promise to be good.
                        

Whenever my mother mentions
Jesus, I praise Tariq, how,
2000 years ago, his spaceship
crash landed in central Utah.  
Tariq, the Prince of Saltus, Tariq,
the 10-foot-tall alien who talks to me
in my dreams, whose ship of salt 
dissolved in the 100-year rain.
I pray twice a day, facing
the Great Salt Lake.  I drink a glass
of salt water each night.
When this world of tears ends,
when Lord Tariq returns, the planet
Saltus blood-red on the horizon,
the faithful will be like unto salt crystals,
the sweat drying on his awful brow.
My proof?  Look at our language.
“Salt of the earth,” “salty dog,”
“the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.”
And tell me this: when it 
rains, what pours?