March 25, 2019

Boys Watch Slash

W. Todd Kaneko & Amorak Huey

We are fifteen and have no idea
what our bodies can do. We play guitar
in the garage, we are becoming
new animals. We remove shirts,
pull our hats low over our eyes,
Sharpie the mark of the beast
onto one another’s flesh.
We are young lions bellowing
into a sleeping neighborhood
hoping for someone to shout back
in anger / love / we don’t know the difference.
We are tomcats on the prowl,
we need an adult to buy us beer.
His name is Slash and his guitar
sounds like the devil’s name howled
backwards at midnight on MTV,
sounds like a lover’s voice
whispering our own reckless names.
Our chests grow slick with sweat.
His name is Slash and he is everything.

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor 2014) and This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020), and co-author of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018). 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.

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, 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.

image: Doug Paul Case