By Roy Bentley

You didn’t see them? Each time some union buster
whacked a guy upside the head with an ax handle
or put a .45 slug in a heart that beat not just to beat,
they were there, triaging the soon-to-die into Worthy
and Most Worthy, because what are the Undead
but the pissed-off living come back for revenge?

The waitress who can’t get her arithmetic right,
Mae, in the instant she favors those who want but
can never have—she’s one. Those truckers know it.
They recognize the one or two who walk in the light
as something special. They’re reverential as jalopies
whizz by outside on Route 66 like a species of crow.

What is Ma Joad feeding the hungry with? Nothing.
The same Nothing workers can figure to be handed
after hellish hours. Only the dead can live on nothing.
When Tom says windfall peaches will keep you up,
it’s the sort of encrypted speech Spirits use to say
we take sustenance where we find it, regardless.

What is Rose of Sharon giving birth to if it isn’t
Spirit? Ma Joad is there, the weary men watching,
the ghost of her brother Tom—for what is godliness
but what we mean when we say One Who Watches?
How blatant does Steinbeck need to be to show us
that a delivery in a flood is life refusing to yield?

By Roy Bentley

In one of those my parents don’t meet.
One of them doesn’t leave Kentucky for Ohio,
and their chance street-corner collision in Dayton
is the same primal scream of car traffic but without
all that genuine shock of recognition exchanged.
Maybe my mother had met a man for pie
and was leaving the drugstore soda fountain
when another man, Bobby Burns, back from Korea,
stopped her in front of the theater in Neon, Kentucky
and said that the Fleming-Neon Pirates, the varsity
football team, called to mind a case of hemorrhoids,
which made her grin and answer Yes, Bobby, I’m free
to an invitation to see a movie that night at the Neon.
And maybe the kisses lack something, but she’s tired.

In that life, they marry and I’m born in Kentucky—
or Bobby Burns reads a story in The Mountain Eagle
and says the word Cincinnati like it was the shibboleth
he thought he needed to open the Temple of Dream.
Either way, my mother is in Ohio. My father, too.
Maybe my mother is somewhere buying a novel,
something to read herself to sleep, and so chooses
a big book, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
And so they meet in the street and start something
romantic between them because Bobby Burns
“was no Romeo,” or so she might have explained.
Whatever the case, I’d have been my mother’s son.
The firstborn of a woman denied too much for far
too long not to want everything, and then get it.

For Kate Fox