Cocaine Bear
Cocaine Bear is a bear
who ate a duffel bag of cocaine.
The man who performed its necropsy
said it died of everything:
stroke, heart failure, renal failure, cerebral hemorrhaging.
Still…
shame to waste a perfectly good, dead bear…
So it was stuffed, sold to a pawnbroker
who sold it to Waylon Jennings.
The Outlaw gave it to a hustler in Vegas.
When he died, it was bought by a Chinese herbalist.
Then he died, so his widow sent the bear back to Kentucky
Home state of the man who had dropped the cocaine,
who did a poor job bailing out of his plane,
found dead in a driveway
(Can you imagine – your driveway?)
His parachute opened too late.
Now the bear stands up in the bed of a pickup
where he takes pictures with tourists.
He wears a jaunty, Kentucky hat
and a gold chain that says Pablo EskoBear
But the bear is not aware
of his impact on any of them.
He’s not privy to this piece of his own story.
He just got into something he shouldn’t.
And it tasted so good until it didn’t.
Cowboys and Indians
As children,
my father and his brothers
played Cowboys and Indians
and always wanted to be cowboys
So while they ran around
looking for Indians to kill
My grandma would turn
to my grandpa and say,
“You need to tell them that they are the Indians.”
KL Lyons is a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma and a citizen of the Muscogee Nation. Their work has previously appeared in ANMLY, Room Magazine, Eye to the Telescope, and Variant Literature. You can find them on Twitter as @dystopialloon.
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