My Private Wobegon

stories from home

Drinking Coffee at the Central City Cafe

By Laura Treacy Bentley

Tonight at the Carousel,
a stripper will shimmy the organic
macaroni right off the shelves

of the Country Cupboard next door.
And Miller’s Meat Market
will sell its last pound of ground round.

Tonight, the Central City Prayer Station
will rock with tambourines
and storefront rapture.

Repent and Be Healed
and Signs and Wonders
beckon from the window

eternally lined with Christmas lights.
Tonight, Lilly’s Place
will swing with new drunks

who never browse
in the quaint antique shops
that line the lamplit streets

where middle-aged women
walk by day,
looking to buy a piece of the past.

Tonight this second city will spin
and reel at the Carousel,
and some will be saved

from eternal damnation
across the street
at the Central City Prayer Station.

Laura Treacy Bentley
Laura Treacy Bentley is a poet, fiction writer, and occasional literary critic from Huntington, West Virginia who has been published in the United States and Ireland. Her work has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Poetry Ireland Review, Space and Time, The Stinging Fly (Ireland), Antietam Review, blink, Art Times, Eureka Literary Magazine, Wind, and Nightsun, among others, and in numerous anthologies. She won a Fellowship Award for Literature from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts in 1994. In March 2003, she had the honor of reading her poetry with Ray Bradbury at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, and her poem, "For Joel" (blink), was featured on Poetry Daily. Laura hopes her first poetry collection will be published in her lifetime. She just finished a suspense novel set in Ireland, The Man in the Silver Suit, and is actively seeking an agent. You may contact Laura at LTbentley7@msn.com.