Monsters

By Roy Bentley

Most who became monsters turned back into people 

after a few weeks, but some, sadly, did not.

—Teddy Wayne, “The Age of Monsters” (The New Yorker)

I caught Lon Chaney’s wolfman act. I saw Bela Lugosi, too.

A lot of Dracula and Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein—

whatever the doctor was trying to restore began with a spark

then came alive at about the giga-voltage of a lightning strike.

But there’s also the monster my father could become after booze

before he left us. In the movie of our life, he never made it back 

to human form. There are fathers and then there are men leaving 

you with a desolate adult—like a kid knows how to help a mother

keep it together and get off her ass. Be daring again, having been

abandoned with kids. He’s dead, my impenitent father, so what 

good is saying shit—anything about any of it? Nothing, I guess. 

Unless, by some fairylike magic, you add him showing me 

love begins with being around. Not just at Christmastime,

when love is a fistfight or the threat of one at twenty-eight-oh-

eight with a couple of Cadillacs in the asphalt drive

and a ’48 Mercury coupe he promises he’ll restore—

under the billowing tarp beneath the carport roof

by headstones dated after the Revolutionary War,

headstones he rolled down a hill for trash cans 

to rest upon, saying, No one was using them.

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Roy Bentley (he/him) is the author of Walking with Eve in the Loved City, chosen by Billy Collins as finalist for the Miller Williams poetry prize; Starlight Taxi, winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize; The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana, chosen by John Gallaher as winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize; as well as My Mother’s Red Ford: New & Selected Poems 1986 – 2020 published by Lost Horse. His work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, december, Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner, among others. His latest is Beautiful Plenty (Main Street Rag, 2021).