The New Mexican federales lay in ambush
on the Llano Estacado highway between
Los Lunas and Fort Sumner. Where Crazy Horse
was imprisoned, and Billy the Kid buried.
 
My Acapulco gold connection was bringing
kilos of killer buds in boxcars from Ciudad de Juarez.

We were traveling heavy, I felt a wisp of danger
like blue sulfur before a lightning storm, Turning
the supercharged pickup onto a dirt road, Juanita
helped me bury the bricks of primo under a yucca

Ten miles further and they would have had us,
they couldn’t even find a roach, that night we
watched Easy Rider naked while diamondbacks
fornicated under a crescent moon.
Catfish McDaris won the Thelonius Monk Award in 2015. He’s been active in the small press world for 25 years. He’s recently been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Polish, Swedish, Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin, Yoruba, Tagalog, and Esperanto.