Horse Was Crazy This Trail Like Geronimo's

horse was
crazy this trail
like Geronimo's she
heard a woman's voice
soft like when she had her
first rendezvous with a vision
of girl buffalo the voice whispering
"it's time to take it out" she startled in
the stirrups and the reins went limp in her
buckskin-gloved hand some secret women's
society of skull and bones lock, stock, barrel, bit
and saddlehorn

she climbed off
her horse, weary and
forlorn, that tin can strapped
on the back resting against the
saddle the one with the woman on
the lid muratti's gold-tipped cigarettes
heavily branded with period imagery

the horse lifted
its front right hoof
and stamped it down
and from a graphic point
of view she opened the tin
with nary a hint of tobacco but
something else of a scent of her
first rendezvous with girl buffalo right
out there in the wide open of the land she
strapped it back on and mounted again when
four women appeared in mirage the red horse in
the lead the woman on it asked her if she knew the
lithograph technique and insisted she was very keen
on pastel shades on tin can lids and the art itself had
remained to be seen

the branding
started at the
turn of the century
but the way they did it
was slightly different when
the woman's vision of her first
rendezvous with a girl buffalo came
at a time when the tin cans fed fantasy
wafting through the wood floorboards in the
general mercantile a smile came from her lips
when she opened the tin and a woman's voice said
"it's time to take it out"

Copyright Ms. Sage Sweetwater, Celebrity firebrand lesbian novelist