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The Plural of Elvis is Elvi
Michael Salcman

Impersonators in Parkes Australia
and Las Vegas prefer
the late model who wore sweat
on his silk scarves and white jumpsuits,
his pompadour well-oiled
as black as burnt wood.

Much easier to ape Elvis in his cage
of sequins and rhinestones
than his sparkling youth
which flew out on Route 66
too soon, as we do;
each life just a half-written song.

—
Michael Salcman, poet, physician, and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, The Café Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine (his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, and healing), A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize), and Shades & Graces (the inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize, published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems, also from Spuyten Duyvil, appeared in early 2022.

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