no bison on the menu
at the Buffalo; this diner
never served it
Big Mike, long gone
named it for the high shelf
on the prairie behind it
where Lakota learned
to stampede beasts over the edge, massacring
hordes without bow or sweat
the gully below,
their forgotten bone yard,
left little trace of them
save half a skull
Mike exhumed and hung on the wall
in the time of polio
before the wide whizzing interstates
when truckers still landed on his dusty lot
their rolling behemoths content in pasture
in a new millennium, the cafe highway is but
an accidental detour; the shack guarded by thistles,
long departed the Detroit steel
the truckers now in the ground, their bones
free from pillage, but the Cyclops on the wall remains,
eyeing the vacant prairie they all once roamed