Poetry

Two Collaborative Poems

by

Slash at the Alamo

Every show is a last stand, every song
the finale. Imagine the bleeding, the noise,
a man tells himself
there’s a purpose to every bullet.
You are here with your band, time to kill,
photos to snap: astride a cannon,
whiskey bottle tilted, muscles flexed.
Or peering through a tiny aperture
as if you can see exactly what’s ahead,
how many rifles are pointed your way.
Tonight there’s a stage: music
and attention and you get to choose
your body’s pleasures. For now
there is a collection box:
reminder that memory isn’t free.
Outside these walls a city
and outside that city a desert:
the world burns and breaks open.
Every note you’ve ever played
is worth fighting for.
Take your hat off for once,
shove in a fistful of bills,
imagine this gesture counts for something.

Slash at the Colosseum

The chariots have spun their final laps. The last rhinoceros
has been ridden to death. All the citizens have been fed
into the emperor’s gullet. The empire is a skeleton graveled
over the continent. So much empty sky to fill with a dream:
a gladiator struts in with his desire for glory and the edge of his axe.
When the crowd looks to you for thumbs up or down, give them
the devil’s horns. Give them a man and an animal and an instrument
fighting in a single body. Give them something ruinously beautiful.

W. TODD KANEKO is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor 2014) and co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018). His poems and prose can be seen in The Normal School, Superstition Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Diode, Monkeybicycle, and many other places. A Kundiman fellow, he is co-editor of Waxwing magazine and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he teaches at Grand Valley State University.

AMORAK HUEY’s second full-length collection of poetry, Seducing the Asparagus Queen, won the 2018 Vern Rutsala Book Prize and was published by Cloudbank Books. He also is author of Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015) and the forthcoming Boom Box (Sundress, 2019), as well as two chapbooks. A 2017 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, he is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.

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