Martin Ott & John F. Buckley

Raised in Michigan but now living in Southern California, John F. Buckley and Martin Ott began their ongoing games of poetic volleyball in the spring of 2009. Poetry from their collaboration has also been accepted by the Bryant Literary Review, Compass Rose, Confrontation, Conceit Magazine and Eleven Eleven.

A Lone Star Stomachache

A mound of brisket like a Boot Hill midden buries the platter before

the contestant. He plows through it, tilling the beef and protracting

teeth, letting barbecue sauce ride high on his face, sowing flecks

along a brow furrowed by early memories of caking kitchen salt

on his belly grumbling with hunger, on his education for devouring

everything in sight taught by pigs and cows on a human salt lick.

He recalls the first time the Rangers brought him back home, having

caught him chewing brands off cattle on a nearby ranch. He warned

them of his passion for revision, barbed canines like dog-blue pencils,

his endless nights with farmhands smoking Winstons and devouring

diaries of 19th Century women pioneers, which he recast into bawdy

limericks for dinnertime chants, iron triangle ringing, provoking a pace

in his veins like the hum of a corpuscular editor seeking buffets.

He yodeled "Belief...it's what for dinner" to faithful coyotes sniffing

for answers on the horizon, out where the antelope plagiarize recipes.

He remembers performing at the birthday gala of an ex-president

who dared Secret Service agents into matching him for each skirt

steak and sirloin slider, and only when the sun sank into his maw

did they look down his craw to a grunt's gut in Kandahar, stippled

with shrapnel and marbled with fat, the intersection of East and West,

all hanging out on the side of the road, by the sprightly poppy heads

bouncing in the audience as he neared his final swallow to the firing

of the ceremonial pistol and his father pretending to be tagged,

doubling over in pride and laughter, his state-sized son victorious

in his Plate of the Union address, the paean to consuming the substance

of others. The ululation of gullets crackled like stuffed M-16 carbines,

and journalists nodded as the tightened belts exploded like fireworks.