Pistols and Artifacts

Pistols and Artifacts

There are collections of pistols

racked in cherry,

mahogany, glass cabinets

owned by men of women—

Polished and loaded

between legs

of wine, dinner parties, cabarets

and the sun’s of a bourgeois

season son.

The collectors watch their cabinet

by night, when

lightning charges

the pistols

in uncanny light;

visible then,

steel pistils in religious right.

Others collect, in cabinet,

only the knowledge

of the Indiana Jones artifact,

repossessed,

for women,

from kingdoms overgrown.

When stigma pawnshops

call in the middle of the night,

the collector sleeps happy

from adventures under the sun.

Inside the cabinets,

women see artifacts taken by

pistols and pistols protected as

artifacts and under the sun,

they shrug, comfortably fond of the

understood flower.