No-Name
Bingo Club
by
Marissa Rose
Named
for want of anonymity
or
lack of creativity, it’s anyone’s guess—
dead
nights and a vacant parking lot
both
transformed by that institution
setting
up snap-leg folding tables
in
an old store-front, Sunday nights in town.
Not
holy enough for night church?
Pay
your looseleaf dollars and unfold
your
chair among the long, brown rows.
It
was not a brotherhood—
the
prizes were canned peas or a bus pass—
but
a queer girl could do worse,
stamping
daubers the color of road vests
over
a grid that looked the same
each
time you played. You could feel lucky
when
luck was doled out evenly
between
you and the octogenarians,
and
if the numbers didn’t jag
in
stair-steps toward your favor,
at
least they never tried
to
save your soul.
It
went the way most places went:
there,
and then not. The town
did
not spin off its axis, or even,
after
a time, recall what the paneled walls
once
held. Sometimes the carnies
would
set up ski-ball and a ferris wheel
in
the parking lot, spinning glitz
incomparable
to the cage of numbers
that
once bubbled and called out for you.
Marissa
Rose's
work has previously appeared in Tangerine Magazine, Facing LGBTQ
Pride, and Raleigh Review, among others. In 2016, she was a finalist
for Poet Laureate of the 100th Running of the Indianapolis 500 and
was selected as the representative poet for Delaware County, Indiana,
in the collection, Mapping the
Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry.