My Atomic Pin-Up | Damon Hubbs

My Atomic Pin-Up

Binion’s Horseshoe is a rest stop on death’s highway.
We’re in the hotel’s north-facing room
on a sofa shaped like an old-style riverboat. 
Igneous cracked succulents are pinned 
like voodoo dolls against the sky.

Miss Atomic Energy 
shakes fallout from her dress 
and it frissons like a forest of morels
on the glitter gulch carpet.
The Evening Telegraph said she radiated loveliness.

A new part of the soul wakes up
when the desert wind cries on Frenchman’s Flat. 
What does it sound like?
Like 16,800 years ago 
when Lake Bonneville

bled out into southern Idaho
leaving the salt flats 
to homegrown racers and their Gadgets

the speedway a buster-jangle
of roadsters and lakesters 
winking like Trinitite on dry white rime.

Me and my atomic pin-up
put on sunglasses and count down from ten. 
The sky, Gerboise bleue with teeth like flamethrowers; 
our old-style riverboat upshot in a knothole of sand 
and scorpion gunwale 

Damon Hubbs is film & art lover / pie bird collector / author of the chapbook ‘The Day Sharks Walk on Land‘ (Alien Buddha Press). Damon’s poems have been featured in Book of Matches, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Otoliths, Datura, Roi Faineant Press, Apocalypse Confidential, Yellow Mama, Sparks of Calliope, Cajun Mutt Press, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Horror Sleaze Trash, The Beatnik Cowboy, and elsewhere. He lives in New England. @damon_hubbs