Roy Bentley

CIGARETTE-LIKE AND RED

A basement furnace has just kicked off.

We lean in at the bottom of the old Lennox

until we see a blue-and-whooshing pilot light

and the perforations in the shadowplay acting

as ploughshare to divide us from the year 1969—

the year before John Lennon Paul McCartney

George Harrison Ringo Starr call it quits.

The phonograph spins the Beatles, Let It Be.

Tom Kozlowski is talking between the tracks,

between taking turns blowing serial capillaries

of marijuana-smolder up a furnace flue, the thin

smoke hypotenuse between us as white as bone.

After that, maybe something is said or nothing

because Nothing is what inaugurates the part

of the world Wittgenstein says you can’t see.

I climb onto the stool. I am in the world but,

with the help of my friend Tom, I look out

from the world. Both our fathers have jobs

at the air force station. Mine is due home

any minute. We watch for shift-change:

on the lookout for a Pontiac Gran Prix

with the country music station up loud

so that Merle Haggard can sermonize

about not smoking pot in Muskogee

while the war drags on in Viet Nam

and the jeopardy of the Draft looms

as colossal as longing then dissolves

like it was nothing. It isn’t nothing.

Roy Bentley has published eight books; including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, who is bringing out a new & selected. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Rattle, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Shenandoah among others. Full Profile

Roy Bentley, a finalist for the Miller Williams prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City, has published eight books; including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, who recently issued a new & selected entitled My Mother’s Red Ford. Roy is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in Evening Street Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Rattle, and Shenandoah among others. Hillbilly Guilt, his newest, won the Hidden River Arts / Willow Run Poetry Book Award.

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