Solitaire | Rikki Santer

for Mickey Rooney and his “Last Night of a Jockey” (from Twilight Zone)

In the paradise of remembering, you begin nestled and sparkling in that last clearing of

Shakespeare’s enchanted forest, No more yielding but a dream, Puck’s uppity nose stayed

with you for a lifetime. Your kazoo-voiced kid with stars & stripes in a comic-strip grin,

five-foot-two, song-joke-dance-man polish, big box office draw now wailing in a run-

down box of a room Serling made just for you, pint-sized prince rounding the far turn

and coming up fast on the rail. You played it straight: rage, grief, searing self-loathing,

gristled the phone’s receiver, each reflective object a painful mirror, walls closing in as

your consonants rattled, your character out of his mind with shortness, neon gel of your

ranting, nighty night, thunderstorm, then awakened to your feet dangling off the foot of

the bed and you, cowed by the cackling of a slicked-back, suited alter-ego into a ten-foot

Stretch Armstrong now jockeyed out of jockeydom, this one-man episode, your acting

chops in blazing, raw bravura. Your legacy complex: Lothario & Gambler & Victim of

Elder Abuse which is to say a Hollywood Train Wreck when at 93 you ended your tableau

with frayed pockets: king as high, ace as low.

Rikki’s work has appeared in various publications including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Slab, Slipstream, [PANK], Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Hotel Amerika andThe Main Street Rag. His work has received many honors including five Pushcart and three Ohioana book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His tenth collection, How to Board a Moving Ship, is forthcoming this fall by Lily Poetry Review Books.