It isn’t an easy landing. They miss the runway entirely. No one hears the
crash. On the threshold of the sprung door a half-naked Door screams “jettisoned
in mute nostril agony...” and leaps, eyes closed, down the chute
in a puff of smoke. A soft croon that could be mistaken for a moan arises weakly
resurrected in the back of the plane. Frankie staggers out, black bowtie unhitched,
rubbing his eyes. Looking over black horn-rimmed glasses, Buddy hollers, “Didn’t
you get on the wrong plane?” “What happened to the Rat Pack?”
Frankie croons-moans, sitting down on a flat rock, hands in his head feeling for
the last of anything profound left from profound memory loss. A desert wood rat
climbs up the rock, whiskers twitching, and lays down an offering of bones. “I
said Ratpack, not Pack Rat,” Frankie cries, smashing an empty bottle against
the weak beam of a landing light. Behind him white blues, hair in flames, belches
fire like a dragon. She offers Frankie her bottle and hotly blows into his ear,
“Honey, here, have a drink. Maybe it’ll help you remember.” “How
far are we from the Strip?” Frankie asks. “I don’t remember getting
on a plane. Sammy and Dino are waiting at The Sands.” With neon butterflies
detonating from his Afro and blinking out in a riff of stiff wind, Jimi exhales
Purple Haze. Morrison, now totally naked, runs off into new moon madness, accompanied
by howling coyotes. The soft-spoken Nashville boy, missing the splendid chaos of
the living and finding no frenzied fans waving lighters in the air to keep his spirit
alive, pulls his superhero cape over his head. “I told you to turn left, you
simpleton!” Janis shouts at him. “It was on autopilot,” the King
mutters under his cape. Squinting at a strange sky filled with stars he no longer
recognizes, Frankie suddenly starts, pointing toward a diffuse crown of light on
the horizon, “Look,” he says, “The Sands.” And so it is.
Sand and more sand. Sand and more sand.
newest poetry collection, Lost Transmissions, is available from Serving
House Books. He is a Fishtrap Fellow, Rhysling Award winner, a recent Playa resident,
2010 Spur Award finalist for best Western poem, and recipient of three Fellowships
for Publishing from Literary Arts, Inc.
Poems recently appeared in on-line journals, Elohi Gadugi and Fiddleback.
He is editor and publisher of Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC and managing editor of Phantom
Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism. He lives in La Grande, Oregon.