» Poetry

Dolly Parton Sings to Burt Reynolds at the End of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas

Jacklin Farley

I will always love you, Burt Reynolds, even

whilst clinging to the foot of the stairs leading

into this now empty country parlor, in this now

vacant farmhouse just outside the county limits

of your well-intentioned, home-grown-American,

damned near stupid conservative small town. I will

always love you in the silence of ceiling fans once

turning in every room because of the utility bill

that I always paid on time with good money, and

I will always love in the dissipated cloud of fussy

and fat hens that were once pecking worms from

my backyard, so rich with dirt. And I will always

love you just as I am now – with my enormous tits

and neon blonde wig beehived up to high heaven –

and from the unfathomable depths of my steel blue

-cut eye creese and snatched suede pioneer dress

although you know better than anyone in the state

that I have always made due loving you in less. And

as I will always love you falls from my Pepto-pink

Barbie doll lips, I thrust away the urge to touch you

as I have many times before in the night, because now

more than ever I wish I could just suckle you, your

obnoxiously chiseled mustached face, and just plum

forget about the mass of good, working girls – my girls –

now hurdling on Greyhound buses towards every major

US city on the map with open legs all because some

morally corrupt televangelist with a bad bowl cut made

you out to be less of man. But I will always love you,

because once upon a time, I thought you were more. Men

before you have always found ways to point to my ruin

and yet still invented cruel and unusual methods of soiling

me better than I ever could on my own. Even the script

says that when I finally stop singing I will always love you,

you will ask me into your sheriff’s cruiser and I must go

off with you, because the only way the whore is rectified

is when she becomes the wife. I will always love you, but

I wonder what else you’d do if you really loved me like

I thought you did. I hope you would let me keep my name.