THE SPEAK EASY

Dahn Shaulis (aka Vegas Quixote) has a Ph.D. in Sociology from UNLV. Like many Las Vegans, he lives from paycheck to paycheck. He has been an infantry officer, hot-stamp printer, and substitute teacher.

Dahn often writes about the realities of working-class life in Las Vegas. His recent poems appear in the Apricorn Anthology and The American Dissident. He has also written short stories for Nevada Magazine and Marathon & Beyond.

email: dahn@nevada.edu

webpage: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Bistro/1745

[Why I Came to Las Vegas]

It's a nice White place to visit
And a nice White place to leave
>From lazy town to rural route
With a Hee Haw ennui
And a Hee Haw SAL-UTE!
Fifty miles in the sticks
Eighty years in the past
Thank God I don't live there
In the forest and the overcast
Though many live and they die there
And seem to love it just the same
All the same
The world doesn't come there
Not for me, anyway

[Ode to an Aged Cocktail Waitress]

At age thirty-seven
the forces are relentless in their punishment
Banishing her to the smoky reaches of the realm
Flogging her aching back
and her sagging-mother-tits
though she props them up in wire baskets
and she shellacs her thinning hair
and she coats a crimson river
over corners of her lips
and she applies a magic marker
where her eyebrows once resided
and she holds her final grip
by her nicotine-stained fingernails
as her shaded leg encasings
do their very best
to dam the purple rivers
and mounds of bumpy flesh