Frontier

by A. J. Bermudez

I love a Western.
Give me sky & land
sun as a doomsday clock
whalebone stays & fourteen-inch waists
whatever’s for dinner’s whatever you shot 

Give me hot heads & hot hands & hot springs
freedom as a slat-board whorehouse
balustrade as civilization
bathwater as baptism

Give me a gun one can freeze his tongue to in the cold
or burn off his fingertips in June

Give me medicine as guess
infection as dignity

Give me cliffs that don’t run out
repercussion as myth
ocean as myth
law as myth

Give me us & them
Give me right & wrong
Give me trophies on the ridge spun from gingham & hair
Give me the cricket quiet of a pasture that could only ever be ours

Give me.

A. J. Bermudez is an award-winning writer and filmmaker who currently serves as Editor of The Maine Review and Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Her work has been featured at the Yale Center for British Art, Sundance, the LGBT Toronto Film Festival, and in a number of literary publications, including The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Boulevard, Story, and elsewhere. She is a former boxer and EMT, a current Steinbeck Fellow and Lambda Award Finalist, and is a winner of the Pushcart Prize, the Diverse Voices Award, the Page Award, the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.