Matt Phillips

GUNFIGHT NEAR THE OK CORRAL

Tin can rattle in his lungs, Doc Holliday

shrugs a long black coat onto his baby

-white shoulders, shifts his killer’s hat

with piano key fingers, he straps

two widow-makers against his hips.

His costume, complete, sketches

a full-length apparition in black. Young

mister sirs will draw Doc in their diaries

after this, a stick figure

with one short leg, because he limps.

  

I imagine tiny bubbles bursting

across Doc’s lips, his whiskey spittle

shot to sheen by a dirty kid’s toy pistol.

I see the slim, straw-lawman amble. I see him

grin, a whiskey-dosed devil. Doc passes

shopkeepers, saloon-men, the beefy madam

in her lace and bruises. After this

they’ll whisper, Doc Holliday

is a cold-blooded killer, a surgeon

with a pistol.

I see the poker-faced scarecrow scrape

his boots through mud and horse shit,

I see him float down Fremont Street. His eyes

trace nervous thumb-twitches

and tobacco smoke on the boardwalk.

Doc fantasizes he’ll swipe his palm

across his revolver’s steel hammer, he’ll

plug lead into bone, shatter skin. I fantasize

I’m Doc. I imagine myself a killer.

I shout, mama! I’m Doc! I’m Doc! I’m…

Imagine it didn’t happen, say Doc Holliday

slept, belly-up drunk in a drab rooming-house,

tobacco fumes clouding his lungs, say

his guns lay unloaded on the bedside table?

The repercussions; a century’s

flashy gunplay vanishes behind

an invisible muzzle blast, an afternoon nap

carries Doc’s howling bullets back

into their chambers. Say we never

knew his name? Say, who is Doc Holliday?

Papers have it different, letterpress proof

Doc threw-down, maybe fired first.

He lived thirty-six years a man,

he coughed and wheezed and stammered, he

sucked blue sky like a fish, inhaled dust.

And somewhere, in Topeka, in Grass Valley

or Tombstone, in Santa Fe, in Prescott

or West Texas, Doc Holliday shrugs

a long black coat onto his baby

-white shoulders, shifts his toy pistols

and grins. He is a specter who shouts

through a young boy’s lips, mama! I’m Doc!

Matt Phillips is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas-El Paso. His murder ballad-noir novel, Redbone, was published by Number Thirteen Press in May, 2015.