Running from the Neon Morning After the Book Festival
By Shaun T. Griffin
Marooned in the Rio, the drunks asleep at the tables,
a pit boss climbs the slow rope to obscurity,
and my friend hangs on his eggs at the bar. The southern
wind tosses the breath of books like sand. Would that they
be read like the two women stumbling the revolving door behind me,
a twelve pack of Miller Lite in their arms, the last refuge of pain
on Saturday night.
At the dais,
my novelist friend and I try to wed four decades of words
from this land and the taco trucks skip to the corner,
the howling gusts cut the airplanes from their sky.
Prisoners of the glitz hotel, may we find the stairwell, huddle
the suitcases of fortune. My friends who live in this town
turn their backs to the wild. They write, they play, but
cannot pretend
the origami sunrise pits the fraying dollar. And once,
we overhear, the neon runs to the vegas, the fertile lowlands,
Lorca may return, Machado, maybe even Bolaño. Then
the books will wobble the last tourist on the strip—
poor water of mine, we think, bubble the distant springs
and someone rise from the desert, disciple of what
way forward now to divide and dry, divide and dry.
Chuy on the Street by Shaun Griffin 11"x15" watercolor, 2022.
Mother and Children without the Wall by Shaun Griffin_11"x15" watercolor, 2022.
Waking Early in Elko, After the DACA Film Screening
By Shaun T. Griffin
for Gail, Alejandro, and Heather
All night the train moaned the tracks,
a few hunters on the wind, and tried to sleep
in the old Basque hotel come art gallery—.
What immigrant is this who storms
our waiting door? Into the films we
walked, no green card to abide the purple
hour of staying too long in the
new country, the idle change of being
from there or here, who could imagine
its exoskeleton in the timid room?
And I walked out early to find coffee,
the cold air like a blanket of not knowing
who to reach for in this foreboding sky
and found some gas for the truck and drove
the thin line home. No minister to save—
I prayed to the antelope that they may
ride the new frontier of brown and white,
find in the new-fallen fence a field to roam.
And the barbed vision running for the door.
Blogger photo courtesy of Shaun T. Griffin.
Shaun T. Griffin is a poet and artist who also serves as Board Chair of the Nevada Humanities Board of Trustees. He co-founded and directed Community Chest, a rural social justice agency, for 27 years. Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me—Essays from a Poet was released by the University of Nevada Press in 2019. His new book of poems, No Charity in the Wilderness, is forthcoming from the University of Nevada Press in 2023.