The skirts are off the tables.
A bucket’s on the floor
Until the plumber shows up.
In comped rooms, whales still snore.

An escort takes the day off
For visitation rights.
McCarran’s slots are ringing
With scores of outbound flights.

Housekeeping finds stray bits of
What happens and stays here:
Pawn tickets and a red chip,
Three shoes and one brassiere.

Booms or busts in housing
Roll through the neighborhoods,
And long-haul trucks deliver
All necessary goods.

Lit hard against the evening,
Severe and even grand,
The Luxor’s daytime profile
Recedes into the sand.

*****

J.D. Smith writes: “What happens behind the scenes—backstage, in the restaurant kitchen, under the metaphorical hood, what have you—has long fascinated me. Most of the time we don’t get to see the mechanics, the furious underwater paddling of the duck.
“In my experience, nowhere is the gap between the making and the made more pronounced than in Las Vegas. In the previous century a town of about five thousand people has grown to a metropolitan area of a million or so and well beyond its ecological carrying capacity, now accommodating a major airport with slot machines at the gates. Entertainment of all kinds depends on relatively low-paid labor, and pawn shops can be found off the Strip but conveniently close to it.   
“The city’s artifice if not hubris arguably culminates in the Luxor Hotel, which my friend the writer and editor Henry Perez has called “the world’s largest piece of kitsch.” I would also call it an embodied non sequitur. A glass pyramid with a massive Sphinx, it imitates the most famous structures of a civilization based on floodplain agriculture, generally not a viable option in Nevada. The Luxor is part of a small break in the desert, and my money is on the latter.”

This poem was collected in The Killing Tree.

J.D. Smith’s seventh collection of poetry, The Place That Is Coming to Us, will be published in September by Broadstone Books. His first fiction collection, Transit, is available from Unsolicited Press. Further information and occasional updates are available at www.jdsmithwriter.com.

Photo: “Why I hate Las Vegas” by mayhem is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.