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. |
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