Two Poems
Roy Bentley A Brief History of the Rain in the Sunshine State The first year, I saw rain crush bougainvillea blooms and I had a vision of Andrew Jackson on a white horse, fetlocks of the animal showing a great reflex-shudder, Jackson’s epaulettes like suns. Second year: nothing: the frontage road for the landfill rutted and cracked and neighbors bitched about the armadillo tunneling under adjacent houses. Said they’d show it no mercy. Third year, if I even felt rain start, I’d hit the flashers. In the convertible, I’d pull over and I’d put up the top. By then, I knew about rain blindness in heavy traffic. I learned to slather-wax Rain X to my car windshield: so the torrent would river and bead: to help the wipers. The five years I lived there I felt like Jackson’s horse: like I lived to inhale and exhale the heat. My last July, last night, fireworks signed the air over the Atlantic. I remember that. And I remember losing everything and then driving north past a place, off I-95, where the Sinaloa Cartel shot a man. Shot his dog, too. Florida is tough on everyone. I guess the soul wants what it wants in the absence of mercy. Home, Sweet Home I saw it in Bill Potter, my mother’s brother, working his shift and overtime and driving across a Dayton of race riots and Segregation. He seemed to want or need to hide a wound. Said he bolted from east-Kentucky coal fields. His sister / my mother Nettie would say, Hush like the secret he was safeguarding she was too. I used to think of their Southern-accented voices like the sweeping sound of a straw broom: a music. If you asked me to pick one song for Bill’s long drive to and from Frigidaire, Inc.—“The Tears of a Clown” by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles: the clown, by extension, hard-weeping for the country since what’s wrong is only answered in part by the act of lacing up a pair of work boots and stepping onto a factory floor loud with machine promises. Lies about the differences between want and need, the algorithmic ratio of peril to prize. |
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About the Author: Roy Bentley is the author of five books of poetry, including Starlight Taxi (Lynx House Press), which won the 2012 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine Press), which was the winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, Any One Man (Bottom Dog Books), and Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama), which won the University of Alabama Press Poetry Series Award. His fifth book, Walking with Eve in the Loved City, was a finalist for the 2018 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press.