You don’t want the cowboy,
the one downing Coors Lights a floor beneath the club, the man so, so protective over his Cattleman as your twentysomething friends play-flirt with him, rugged hands grazing too-soft skin, the way he called you a “Brokeback Mountain type” & refused to shake your hand, his “I <3 beer & titties” shirt an emblem of ego, so, so psychoanalytic, the guy always on top but nothing above or below, you’ve known him before, in Oklahoma, in Nevada, the road traveled thus far, & you’ve let him inside you to become danger, maybe tame it, the wildwood enclosing the sunlight of your desire, & it’s never the careful fantasy written by women you so, so love, & you think while stroking the leaves of the Cebu blue pothos your best friend gave you that your ancestors perished in wars to vouchsafe the fool of yourself, a hypo more than a para, as in the id forever searching for a body to hold its heat, a phototaxis to nowhere but the darkness of desperation, & what does this mean when you’ve let it happen to you, to sit in a motel-turned-apartment in a neighborhood full of hipsters when you return from the Eldorado at 5 a.m., not quite the golden hour but something blanker, a silver city that knows itself only in nostalgia, & you like that because selfhood is the largest mystery of your life, almost Aries season, your birthright of the pyre, the sweat & alcohol staining your ren faire pants & Meeko jersey, a West stuck on your fingertips not quite right, but who are you to judge when you’ve wanted the cowboy, you have his hat & lasso hung on the wall like a twisted trophy to remind you of the flare you gave up years ago in pursuit of cum stains, it was so, so fun, an outline of a form looking for the perimeter of flesh to find controlled death, overdramatic as prerogative, & you know everything but really it’s entropy, the calluses you’ve traced in shitty beds to remember: how am I alive, where do I go from the dirt.
Audio: Dani Putney reads “You don’t want the cowboy,”
Dani Putney, Ph.D., is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Filipinx, and neurodivergent writer originally from Sacramento, California. They are the author of Half-Off Boys (Baobab Press, forthcoming 2027), Mix-Mix (Baobab Press, 2025), and Salamat sa Intersectionality (Okay Donkey Press, 2021), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. They live in Reno, Nevada, where they are a senior technical editor/team lead for an environmental engineering firm.