Roy Bentley
Poetry
Roy Bentley is the author of four collections of poetry, including Starlight Taxi (Lynx House: 2013), which won the 2012 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine: 2006), which was the winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2005, Any One Man (Bottom Dog Books: 1992), and Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama: 1986), which won the 1985 University of Alabama Press Poetry Series Award. Recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, six Ohio Arts Council fellowships, and a Florida Division of Cultural Affairs fellowship, he has taught in colleges and universities in Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Iowa, and New Jersey.
The Keno Caller at the Oxford Cafe in Missoula
The number is 7! A woman in a housedress
lays out sugar packets in rows as she follows
a paper card, a thin square of white she marks
with a blue crayon-half in the bar’s spilled light.
The caller is as homegrown as the gaits of horses,
one of which altered the fretboard of his vertebrae.
A tv behind the bar blares that half a million souls
have been disappeared by a tsunami. I’m seated
at a table by a wall. Alone. Under a bison head.
In the glow of a Rainier sign, I’m a boy again:
waiting in the pit area of Kil-Kare drag strip.
I’m waiting for my father and his driver, Lou.
Swales of tire smoke zebra a Crayola-red sky,
a tinny PA system rattling on that Lou has lost
by blowing what the voice calls “a decent light.”
The caller at the Ox is sending a spark shower
from Lou’s ’61 Plymouth, his announcer patter
connecting crayoned-in dots of remembrance.
Limits of time and memory restrict the heart
like the band on the roll of currency a local
sails by to collect. I want a card. Because
I want not to see the caller drag himself
to the door of the Men’s room. I want
to see Missoula, Montana and the caller
in a decent light. My father would do that,
look away, when Lou lost or blew an engine.
In a booth the Sugar Lady arranges packets
as if grace is the etcetera we make happen
above the roar and against great odds.
Roy Bentley
Contest Winner - 3rd Place
Roy Bentley has received fellowships from the NEA, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Pleiades, Blackbird, North American Review, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Books include Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama, 1986), Any One Man (Bottom Dog, 1992), The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine, 2006), and Starlight Taxi (Lynx House 2013).
O, Kindergarten
and Nap Time where platoons of inside voices
identify which bodily function requires answering
by raising the appropriate number of fingers
into the air of 1960. Take this quiet child.
Take a good look at something in his face.
He’s been coloring the same standard-sized
sheet of milk-white paper for fifteen minutes,
and he lacks one cotton-ball blossom of a corner
before he can call it a day. But is black a color?
The truth is that it’s in the carton of The Box of 8,
where undersides are flattened to prevent rolling.
To him, the statuary stick figures are Eskimos
bundled to the point of facelessness in parkas of
moonless night. Which is the explanation he hopes
rescues him from the teacher with the dark down
above her upper lip, a woman bending to offer
the bald fact that black is all colors absorbed
and so it’s not a color. Not in the usual sense.
A pigment. Her wide-open eyes are a future
of shift after shift of feeding unpolished metals
into a polisher with the threat of lay-off or firing
a black possibility. Her bland pronouncement
is the foreman telling him to “get the lead out,”
ordering him to work the overtime he’s offered.
And not to give him any lip, no sir. What’s rare
and irresistible about the kid isn’t overlooked;
it’s like the shadow made by a fence, any fence—
something extra. It isn’t required, but he blushes
as he brushes back a lock of hair and hands her
what he calls “Eskimo, Walking at Midnight.”
She holds it like it’s the body of something feral.
Dead. His father’s paid good money for the look
Miss White gives him that might as well be a slap.
At 6, he’s already been back-handed once or twice.
That’s a look of his own he’s crafted as answer.
Roy Bentley
Poetry
Roy Bentley’s work has been recognized with fellowships from the NEA, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Pleiades, Blackbird, North American Review, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Books include Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama, 1986), Any One Man (Bottom Dog, 1992) and The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine, 2006). Starlight Taxi, his latest, won the 2012 Blue Lynx Prize in Poetry and has just been published by Lynx House Press.