Squaw Mary staggered toward the morning
sun
from a cardboard bed behind the Stockgrowers Bar;
and I was told, though high plains nights get cold,
she seldom felt it, not until she woke up sober,
slapped to her feet by the pain of a world she couldn't
fit to. Men who cared, in that strange way of drunks
and derelicts, left a little liquor in a bottle by
her side, after they had "had their way with her,"
to drown reality before it had a chance to breathe,
inhale her whiskey breath, assault her spirit world.
Fortified against the light, she came out to feel the
touch of morning sun (a solitary kindness), always
backed against the red brick wall, arms crossed,
head down; she bent her knees, and slowly sank
into a drunken-Indian heap. That's when I felt pity,
though more today. Such a quick glimpse of the
world, a tortured glance, before she drank it out.
She always dressed in denim jeans and jacket; her
unkept hair fell a tangle of a thousand tricks she
turned for whiskey. She was young, no more than
twenty-five, but written on her face was life lived
thirty years deeper; scarred too, where a boozed-up
cohort carved his broken-bottle signature. Some
highschool boys faked their manhood with her
reputation: "Fuck her, and your prick rots off."
Even Indian boys were rude when they passed by,
and she called out their names. Except when men,
as drunk as she, took her in a car or alley, Squaw
Mary was alone. That's the way they found her-
in the alley, dead! behind the Stockgrowers Bar,
huddled up against a cold steel barrel, out back
where they put the trash.