Chuck Joy

 Chuck Joy lives in Erie, PA, where he hosts Poetry Scene, a weekly open mike poetry event. The author of How To Feel from Night Club Poetry, 2995, his poems have appeared in many magazines including Rattapallax, JAMA, and Lilliput Review. He is a regular member of the Mercyhurst College Second Tuesday Community Poetry Workshop and his poems were included on their poetry CD, Stone Water. He is also the Poetry Editor for the Newsletter of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

COWBOY LAND

he played her like the bagpipes

or a fish tugging the line

out from the boat of their love

except she wanted to come back

it was the pressure of the ocean

he knew it too, a fascination

with the other fish and a furious determination

never to drown

together, they made an odd couple

a man with a red beard, wearing a kilt

a woman in a bathing suit, covered with scales

there really wasn’t any hook

in fact, they lived in New Mexico

Cowboy Land, in a tiny trailer

filled with kids, broken toaster ovens and beached vehicles

rippling away from them in concentric circles

their best friends were certain lizards

and of course each other, sharing their interests,

Lobo basketball and watching the sky, transitioning frequently

from rock to sun-drenched rock

she played him like nobody’s business

more the fisher than the fish then

high performance monofilament stretched across the sagebrush desert

the pipes, the pipes keening a low wail