The Best Little Whore House in Cripple Creek

marshal tied a string
around his finger, wound
a pink reminder that his town's
three rail lines and streetcar system
catered to the Pearl DeVere affair, gold
prospectors looking for a place to drop their
hard wealth, let their corks fly, champagne and ore,

alpine butterflies
doing figure eights
sixty nine ways above
timberline math, two hundred
fifty dollars a whore,

madam of the
Old Homestead
laid to rest after morphine
claimed another, Mt. Pisgah
Cemetery where mining boom
casualties lay, fraternal orders,
the Elks in this plot, the Woodmen
of the World over there, preachers buried
six feet under by the whores no names on the
markers to fancy up the silk dresses they wore,

you don't get
a lot of money
when your stories
are told in book, the
best little whore house in
cripple creek steady payments
for years thereafter and ever more.

Copyright Ms. Sage Sweetwater, firebrand lesbian novelist