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      June 10, 2019C. Wade BentleyRecalculating

      So Google Maps has me somewhere west of Evanston,
      Wyoming, telling me that to get to the gas station where
      my daughter and her broken-down Subaru are waiting
      for me, I need to go straight for two miles through a quarter-
      mile dead-end trailer park. This is the young woman
      with whom, some Sunday mornings, I have coffee
      and a game of chess as an excuse to get caught up
      on her life and the status of her sobriety. It’s not much
      of a game. I’m a reactive and distracted player and more
      interested in the new medicine she has found in an online
      Russian pharmacy than the fact that her horsey has me
      in a rook-king fork because I failed to castle while the castling
      was good. After asking the tall man in a short kilt
      who comes up to my car with barbecue tongs in one hand
      how to get to town or at least get back to a paved street
      and a street sign with which the GPS has a passing familiarity,
      I am heading in a promising direction, once again, a brace
      of pronghorns racing me along the fence line. I slow
      to let the lesser mammals win, this time, and then come
      to a complete stop in the middle of a road that has likely
      not seen another car since morning, so no one is there
      to wonder at an old man with his head on the steering
      wheel, his shoulders jerking now and then, to wonder
      whether it’s some sort of a medical condition or whether
      years of worry and more recent frustrations with mapping
      apps are being siphoned off. It is in fact a release, relief
      that she is safe after her mindfulness retreat in the mountains
      of Colorado where, as she later tells me on our trip home
      along I-80, the words spilling out of her after her week-long
      fast so that, for once, I can drink my fill—where an owl sat
      all night one night on the sill of the tiny window of her cell-like
      room and where she left an offering of fireweed and granola
      bars at the Great Stupa shrine on her last morning, along with
      a bouquet garni, as she called it, of her addictions, before the hours
      of empty miles across Wyoming, before the Check Engine
      light began blinking wildly, before she coasted into the Sinclair
      station, closed on this Sunday, before she called her dad
      with the last of her cell phone battery and sat, meditating,
      she said, on the green fiberglass dinosaur, knowing I would come.

      from #63 - Spring 2019

      C. Wade Bentley

      “While I remain an incorrigible introvert, poetry has become the language form that works for me when I want to try to say something real to the other humans. It has saved me from a life of atrophy, muteness, and isolation. While I’ve never felt that poetry is up to saving the world, it can sometimes save the poet.”