Strange Privacies: Poems
2006 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest Winner
Publication: 2006
Pages: 28
An excerpt from Section 3: My Father Dressing Me as Zorro, taken from the poem “Listening to Coltrane on the 4th of July”:
Now I’ve lowered a mask over my face
The eye-slits don’t fit, and I can’t see.
I scent the smoke of his cigarette. I tell him
they turned off the electricity, the gas and phone,
that neighbors fed us after he left. I’m feeling
in the gift box for a toy rapier, which I wave
between us. He tells me to stop horsing around:
this close, one of us is likely to get hurt.
Acknowledgements from this collection:
Cortland Review: “Standing in Line with Gerald Stern”
The Journal: sections 3 and 7 of “Listening to Coltrane on the 4th of July”
Laurel Review: “The Medium Eva C. with a Materialization on Her Head and a Luminous Apparition Between Her Hands, 1912”
Mid-American Review: “Death Speaks of a Man Who Started the Day Reading Rubber Trees” and “Strange Privacies”
North American Review: “Woman and Alligator”
Roy Bentley received Ohio Arts Council and National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship awards during the writing of these poems. His book The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana was published by White Pine Press in Fall 2006.
Chapbook, $5.00
ISBN: 978-0-9760413-6-8