Slash at Mos Eisley Cantina
Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko Slash kicks it with a hot Twi’lek, his instrument in its case under the seat because later tonight he’s going to show these abalone heads how to jam the whole universe into a single manic riff. At the bar, that scruffy nerf herder and his old man cleave a walrus-man’s carcass with a quick stroke of moon sliver, Tatooine lightning and mojo. When the band starts back up, Slash knocks back his drink, thinks about the many things he can do with a guitar string: make a man weep into the crook of his arm, remove a woman’s dress, fill a stadium with starlit pain. A hive of scum and villainy, the old man calls this place, smacking of drugs, booze, green blood. Out in the desert, a Tusken Raider stands naked and howls for sparrows; beyond that a planet faces oblivion. Meteors descend in flocks, flowers blooming like the avalanche for gravity, the stars of a deathwish. Slash knows all about the force driving the universe, he pulls his alien girl close and bends a couple of notes down the inside of her arm. He strokes her brain tail, sings in her ear: I know it’s only rock and roll, but I like it. |
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About the Author: Amorak Huey, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, is author of the poetry collections Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank Books, 2018), Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015) and Boom Box (Sundress, forthcoming 2019), as well as two chapbooks. He is co-author of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and teaches at Grand Valley State University.

About the Author: W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor 2014), co-author of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and his poems and prose can be seen in many journals and anthologies. A Kundiman fellow, he is co-editor of the online literary journal Waxwing and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University.