Bruce Craven is a member of the Columbia Business School Executive Education faculty in New York City. In addition to directing and teaching in a variety of executive programs, he teaches graduate business students his popular elective Leadership Through Fiction.  His book Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones, was published in March 2019 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.  The book is currently being translated into Russian and Turkish. He wrote the novel Fast Sofa (1993) which was published in Japanese and German. He also co-wrote the script for the film adaptation, starring Jennifer Tilly, Jake Busey and Crispin Glover. His collection of poetry, Buena Suerte in Red Glitter will be published in 2019 by Red Dirt Press. He lives with his wife and two sons in the Coachella Valley in California.

Gun Crazy

I’m a failure. I fell in love

with the sharpshooting girl

with pearl-handled pistols

in white holsters and the short skirt

trimmed with fringe.

We shot six-shooters together,

then she came

around the corner in a Buick

with running boards and a hood ornament

that shined like God’s right eye in the Kansas sun.

Her patent leather boots were ice-cream white,

same as those dangerous holsters and the yoke

of her midnight blue silk rodeo shirt. White

as her teeth and the fake-pearl snaps.

Her small bosom

unveiled in the carnival noise of sweeping up,

the sound of a generator, voices from a distant poker game.

I’m almost scared.

Her breasts in my hands make me think

of mounds of warm dirt when I was a boy

sitting beside the lake. I leaned

against a big rock out past the drive-in,

took potshots at birds in the sky

with my Crosman Pellgun,

dreaming of coyote, catamount or wolf.

And now

the towns don’t know what hit ‘em.

Bank alarms clang, people wave their arms

or lie down on the sidewalk. And we

count the money and drive.

My love can pick a lit cigarette out of my lips from thirty feet, eyes closed.

My love can hold an empty beer can bouncing in the air on bullets

like it was bouncing down from heaven on a string.

My love can talk for hours, then sleep, curled, in the shotgun seat

with her head in my lap, one arm between her legs

and the road never ends and she only complains about the heat

and this engine is a gem, an oiled gun that fires fast and smooth.

You know they’re never going to catch you.

We got married on the run.

Like real lovers should, she whispered.

Like criminals, joked the man in Reno who sold us a couple boxes of .38 shells,

a bottle of rye and an extra blanket for the cold desert nights.

Then we reached the ocean…the big blue desert

where the Buick is useless.

During day we hide in our white motel and pay cash.

At night, we walk the sand and don’t talk anymore.

Tonight, the waves spill in moonlight. We made a fire out of driftwood and finished the rye.

I held a cigarette in my lips under the carousel of stars.

Her shot ripped the cherry spark

and I jumped like it was the first time.

My love’s breasts are small and beautiful and she trembles

under me now in the cold sand and cries,

not from our passion, but because she shot a man

in the back in the back of a Saving’s & Loan

back near San Bernardino. Three shots.

He was armed. That’s what the newspaper’s say.

He died. Call us killers. Call us another Bonnie and Clyde.

Shown a big picture of the Buick.

Big pictures of me and my love.

I told you I was bad, she says.

I failed you, I say.

She wipes her tears, lifts her pistol. No, you didn’t.

But she’s wrong.

We got nowhere to drive. We got nowhere to hide.

My love points her gun at the sky and fires.

The stars crackle. We got nothing but each other.

We see it before we hear it: the flash of their blue gunfire.

1966

Fingers against the screen door,

bug-light yellowing the porch beyond

my six-year-old threshold. Burgoyne Drive

glittered with imperforate forms,

neighbors caught in the high-beams

of an idling Ford Falcon. Butcher’s paper

spanned between tentacle streetlights:

a single name in blue paint.

Shadow of rooftops a coal black Monopoly.

Mom and Dad on the lawn, arms linked; their voices hushed.

Bap of moths against the eaves,

one step beyond my cell.

A dense furniture of light radiates from every wall.

The world outside in the dark

waits for a neighbor’s son to return from Vietnam.

Everyone waits in that world of hurt.

Horror, a dog-eared pack of playing cards taken home

after the fictional kill-ratios got burned off on the wire.

Skin of some little country bubbling from Napalm,

saturation bombing and the strategy of not losing another domino.

The everyday banter as simple as looking up from the dice

to point at the homespun robe stained with blood; the enemy

caught in the coils of razor wire. Black cloth or olive cloth: dead

from exposure or loss of blood or organ failure. Roll

the dice. Oh, the games the leaders play!

And a blipping rain of incandescent frogs over Da Nang.

But what do I know?

Only that I was reading a picture book that night

about a group of children who painted the white walls

of their bedroom into a miraculous jungle

of maroon tigers, thick, green, lustrous fronds

and fierce, flesh-hungry natives. Knives azure.

Teeth tangerine and sharp. The children run

deeper into the jungle, desperate to paint a way

out, an exit strategy. The children scribble their colored brushes:

bridges, rivers, nets, canoes. They draw solutions.

Anything to stay one step ahead. Anything to elude

the nick of time. Until…

They are trapped! No escape.

Lost in the garden of fear. Evil prowls

in the brilliance of vine, petal, flower; hides

waiting in the shadows. Home so far away.

And only one can of paint left.

The youngest girl grabs a brush, paints the outline

of a door they all remember. A door that will open

into their familiar white bedroom. A door

that will close

and keep the fierce natives locked away.

The danger over by dinner. The jungle as real as TV.

The neighbor’s son returns from Vietnam.

1966.

Mud-Flap Girl

You’ve seen her,

against her black curtain backdrop.

She and her sister, silver and shiny,

roar past on the interstate,

bounce behind the gasoline truck

with the brilliant red WARNING

or maybe the yellow and black BIOHAZARD.

In Brooklyn, there’s an ice-cream step-van

covered completely, a friend told me,

with you. O, Mud-Flap Girl,

you’re so much more than a rebel flag, an eagle, the letters N.R.A.

You’re on my Zippo and you’re in my heart.

You go back in time with me.

You teach me and save me. I’ve met you,

in so many disguises, behind the masks

of women with names and wallets and

different driver’s licenses; phone numbers

scribbled on scraps of bar napkin before something

falters and there is hurt and loneliness

and only you, silver outline that became flesh

and warm and sang sentences, then faded

for one reason or another.

let me smoke another cigarette.

Let me drink another whiskey.

Let me drive nowhere fast.

Let me run my fingers around your hour-glass hips,

the black curtain your silver legs sculpt as you begin to rise,

icon of slender wrist and ankle. Move to me,

but not like a stripper. I’m out of dollars.

Barbarella of exhaust pipes and road tar

and tasteless fried chicken

I wouldn’t feed a starving cat. Baby,

I don’t care and I forgive you and I do, really,

love you when the red lights of the Highway Patrol

surge past in the fast-lane, siren whining, and I sip

my dead coffee and the dashboard glimmers

and the odometer counts each mile like it matters.

When the bartender fills my glass

with flames of bourbon and screaming ice,

you are there beside my cigarettes, looking good.

Women lean forward, cup fingers

around your red flame, give thanks with their eyes.

Smile when they catch sight of you.

No, I refuse to believe your body is a patriarchal lie,

marketed for profit. Your long hair, parted mouth

and up-thrust breasts are more than pornography, more than

the imposition of an unfair and dangerous standard of femininity.

I know this because I have been with you,

have stood beside a white bed, struggling out of my Levi’s

and watched as you pounced onto your knees,

then bounced once on the mattress

like a little girl waiting for a story.

I have heard you plead, C’mon! Hurry!

And I have crawled to you like a man.