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.

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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. 

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