*

Poet R. Steve Benson has been in a variety of literary journals including North American Review, Christian Science Monitor, Minnesota Review, Briar cliff Review, Snowy Egret, South Carolina Review, Weber – The Contemporary West, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore and others. Donald Hall, in his final collection of essays, A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety published in 2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, included his 33 line poem Pissing Beside Donald Hall that was first published in Mudfish magazine in New York City.

IN HIS WHEELCHAIR THIS NAPKIN POET

hands Linda his occasional sonnets

while she dances.  She inserts

them into her bra hooked

over her shy breasts

that gaze like

soft brown

eyes

into dark cups until their future

public unveiling when poems

on napkins will fly into

beery barroom air

in this injured

soldier’s

eyes

where Linda visits his table when

her number is done and she’s

wrapped in a warm gown

smiling friendly down

at the rhymes in

his dancing

eyes.

— Poet R. Steve Benson

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