Congratulations

I've been told that University of Tennessee Creative Writing alum Bobby C. Rogers just received some wonderful (and prestigious!) news regarding his first book manuscript. Since I don't know if the full info is public just yet, I'm going to hold off on specifics, but would just like to say: Congratulations!

Here is a poem by Bobby Rogers lifted directly from AGNI Online. And here's a link to another of his poems which appeared on Poetry Daily a few years ago: "Paper Anniversary."

Jerry Lee Lewis Plays “That Lucky Old Sun” at Bad Bob’s Vapors Club, Memphis, Tennessee

I’ll tell it if you let me, my story of those nights we spent watching

the Killer play

a smoky room down on Brooks Road, almost to State Line. Can’t you

hear the note

of reverence in my voice, the sweet pity of tragedy? Even when he wasn’t

half trying,

the songs fell from his lips so sorrow-encrusted and smoldering, so

flavorful I’d swear

they’d been basketed from the roiling grease of a deep-fryer, his offhand

rendering

of “That Lucky Old Sun” owing nothing to Ray Charles, and everything.

Show me

that river...take me across. There was an inwardness to how he spoke

the song, owning

the piece for just that moment, his leaning over to tell the microphone

what he had to tell it

so personal an act we were almost shamed by our fascination.

The song’s a prayer,

another brief hymn to the emptiness inside us and what we

hope might come

to fill it. On the piano a cigar was cocked and cold in the ashtray,

waiting to be relit

when the song was done. Just a night of sight-seeing, September 1988,

gone slumming

to hear the great and forgotten, none of us quite young enough to be

young anymore.

The Vapors Club was exactly what you’re imagining, show starts at ten,

five dollar cover

at the door. The gray-blue light, where there was light, had grown so

stale and clouded

it seemed to have clabbered, and even the shadows in the shadowy

room were bowed

with the weight of something I didn’t have a name for. The regulars

bore it like soldiers—

paying customers flammable with hairspray and spent chances,

slickened with a whiskey glow,

Ten High bourbon redistilled through their pores, sugary and volatile.

Everyone in the place

had twenty years and a marriage or two on me. They’d lost something

time took, the edges

of experience as fine and full of meaning as the cuttings in the grooves

of an LP record

played too many times on a console stereo in the living room, a

diamond stylus harrowing

its windy memory from the satiny grooves. I was just learning to love,

tallying what cost

to lose myself as one long breath into another person, not knowing

what would be left of me

once I was drawn back into myself. There is a point past which we will

never again be able

to call ourselves detached, but on that night it was just music, a man

punishing a piano

for wanting to keep something clenched in the tension of its iron harp,

just a few hours

taking us toward another night’s savory fatigue and upending, the

insects’ pulsed cries measuring

what was left of the year’s heat, parking lot gravel crunching underfoot,

then the car bounding

over the curb back onto Brooks Road, the bar smells we would wear

for awhile, dance sweat

and menthol 100s, hair spray and Kiwi shoe polish, spray-on perfume.

Then the driving

back to Midtown and our own shabby rooms, the car windows down,

details of the skyline

edge-etched to the windshield, unheavened, sense-bound, all of us

silent and rehearsing

our arrangement of the night’s sharps and flats, a version shaped

to suit our own dying voices.

Bobby C. Rogers
from Agni Online, 10/2008