This week’s BAP poem from Coconut marks the fourth appearance for Anne Boyer’s “You Will Want Like Cowboys”: 1. In Coconut 4; 2. In Best of the Net 2006; and 3. In her 2008 Coffee House collection Romance of the Happy Workers. Anne is so incredibly everywhere & all at once: A way-cool blogger with a frenetic following; guitarist in her own band; brilliant painter/collagist; co-editor (with Kasey Mohammad) of the journal Abraham Lincoln; teacher at the Kansas City Art Institute; author of chapbooks; single mother to her daughter Hazel & cat Ulysses. Anne’s Issue 4 poems have received more hits than any other poems in the history of Coconut, and for good reason: “Cowboys” begins with a repetitive riff on wanting, moving from a focus on the rhetoric of desire through the intangible (“ecstatic”) before landing in local, bodily, everyday Kansas. Along the way there are references both to Goya and to Browning, a restlessness organized by association and fever. I’d intended to solicit work from Anne — she’s one of my very favorite poets — but she beat me to it. Everyone likes Anne’s poems! You will too!
-- Bruce Covey
You Will Want Like Cowboys
I will want like splinters,
astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows.
You will want at smallness,
also squirreling across the wire.
Wantings in the wilderness!
What did you think,
words?
You've seen it all before.
That's my last duchess—
all I want I've learned from her.
I want all I've learned from her.
Like Goya and church
you will fever like derangement.
You will lick no less
the ecstatic, and you will grow no more
accustomed to this dirty purse
than I to breathlessness
or pavement.
There is Kansas in the wilderness.
There is not cloudy.
All day the fingering, there your gaze,
there I will saddle up
the pillow, buckle, bobbin, tongue
I wanted from.
-- Anne Boyer
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