Buffalo Stew

by Gino Sky

I rode out the west like a velvet tornado of american
baby blues with my chromed rig atomic beer and
high school steady indian girl driving me hot out at
nineteen cents a gallon from Pocatello Idaho through
every western novel of shotgun marriages and
manifest divorces and I didn’t understand what it was
that ghosted the highway except there were a
thousand miles of indian towns and cowboy bars
where we drank and sang the sweep along hunkered
streams and everything was american gospel so long
as gasoline and dreams were as cheap as buffalo stew.

This version won the Boise Weekly Literary Prize for fiction in 1997, with the rules of using only 97 words. Published in a slightly different version (Gospel Hump) as a broadside by Limberlost Press, 1987; and, in a chapbook, Spirit Bone, Limberlost Press, 1992.