Benjamin Myers is a winner of the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry and the author of two books: Lapse Americana (NYQ Books, 2013) and Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). His poems are forthcoming in, or have recently appeared in, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Nimrod, Salamander, DMQ, Measure, Tar River Poetry, and other journals. Online, he has been featured on Verse Daily and Everyday Poems, as well as on the blog for 32 Poems. He frequently reviews contemporary poetry for World Literature Today and teaches literature and writing at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he is the Crouch-Mathis Associate Professor of Literature.

Mannequins

All our most incessant mythology suggests
they are on the move
when we aren’t
looking.

Without turning
we know
the crowds
of the faceless–
pastel polo-shirts,
white shorts,
hair a plastic suggestion–
are massing like an army
of the dead
slowly behind us

because we have seen
it in the late-night
movies we record
our dreams in.

They are a silent mob,
an underwater forest
of carnivorous plants,
inching their way toward
hapless swimmers.

You know this and are careful
not to linger
in department stores
as the last lights shudder out.

But flat on your back at night,
staring eight feet below
your ordinary ceiling,
you know also what it is
to be them:
immobilized
in the window and gazing
across a busy avenue,
while on the opposite shore
your would-be lover stands
behind the plate glass, looking
helplessly back across
the flesh-filled street.

from Lapse Americana, (NYQ Books, 2013)

Bad Harvest

The roving combine crews have moved on north to Kansas,
their hulking green machines wobbling on flatbed trailers.

With little rain comes little wheat, the fields left like a dog
shaved for mange. Mornings, I sit on the porch with the paper

until the heat drives me inside. Last year there was this pretty
cashier at the Dollar General, her face round and nice, but the meth

sucked her inside out bit by bit over the year, so that
by harvest she was old paper from a wasp’s nest. I’m thinking

about things that don’t turn out right: it’s like William Henry Harrison,
who won the “common man” with log cabin-shaped bottles

of hard cider and a reputation in war; science may tell
us his long speech in the rain and cold had nothing

to do with the pneumonia that killed him 30 days
into his term, but what does science know about disappointment?

When I was almost through with college, I crossed a lake
so red you would think only the Pentecostals could have dreamed it,

and lived for a week on the other side, painting my uncle’s cabin,
refreshing the white of the trim and railings. Working under

hot glare, I would run into the murky red lake, feet slurping
through leaf rot and mud. Then one day it rained and I sat

on the porch reading Hemingway under clear plastic
sheeting. I was 23 and engaged, dumb as a bull frog,

eating chili from a can and making margaritas
from limeade and cheap tequila. I thought

I was writing a novel. Evenings I would watch the trotline
bobbers nodding into the darkness and each morning

wake beneath mosquito netting on the porch. I actually thought
I was writing a novel. Thank God it didn’t turn out that way.

from Lapse Americana, (NYQ Books, 2013)