Roy Bentley
America as Ex
About the 1776th time I begged her not to spend money
we didn’t have and she ignored me—we’re not together.
But if we talk on the phone, I’ll start in wanting her back.
Lately, however, I’m hearing the language of despotism.
A dismissal of the sorrow of others. For as long as I’ve
known her, her vibrator War—that’s what she calls it—
has been her dearest tool. Before, her Federal Reserve
Bank of infidelities might have been almost defensible,
but then she whined, The effing poor are such a pain.
To say you loved her, in those days, was to place
yourself in contention. Because you wanted what
she wanted, which was everything. I loved her then.
But I’m prepared to watch her walk over the skyline,
waving off the exceptional distance ahead and behind.
I see buds she brings to flowering, that history. And can
identify some in Ohio in spring, though I hate accounting
for that weed-heart. Whatever else, screamers like her
are all about pain. And some love will get you killed.
Roy Bentley is the author of Starlight Taxi (Lynx House: 2013), winner of the 2012 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize; The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine: 2006), winner of the 2005 White Pine Press Poetry Prize; Any One Man (Bottom Dog Books: 1992); and Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama, 1986), winner of the 1985 University of Alabama Press Poetry Series Award. Recent work has appeared in Shenandoah, The Southern Review, december, North American Review, RATTLE, and elsewhere.
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