Ohio Connections Literary Exhibit
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Being from Dayton
By Roy Bentley
We are in flight here. We’ve come looking for runways.
Pastures flatten under us, wildflowers beaten down
by contraptions dropped from the barely navigable air.
Indigenous are offspring of the Freedom Railroad,
Ohio the yes vote for a future where wide-eyed looks
count for nothing or are overtaken by what’s real
& jobs that grow on trees beside the still waters.
Dayton used to be home to the Wright Brothers.
The Belmont Drive-In Theatre, stories of light
& the unforeseen. Roy’s Shell on Wilmington.
Fear of loss made families of strangers
then silent strangers of the same families
made to witness the end of a dream of something
ripped up like yard weeds by factory work.
The whole of my heart is Appalachian
& means never to settle anywhere. I keep a
pair of suitcases packed, being from Dayton. My
youngest sister manages a mall. My other sister
makes loans for Bank One. They’re pissed-off
at the world, like my mother, from loving
this place (& the last) & having to uproot.
One by one we pack up & leave the city,
the suburbs, Kettering & Trotwood, all the houses
it took our best efforts to buy, some beautiful,
some so undeniably ugly as to be eyesores,
stains upon an already-trampled landscape. We think
surely Wright-Patt, the air base, will save us
with a civil service job & retirement in Fairborn,
this city of servants; of slaves, really.
We are from Dayton. We don’t like to fly.
We know Wilbur Wright died in a landed bed,
of influenza, a sickness born of close contact
with other humans, then crowd in together to work
in aerospace museums, at Daimler-Chrysler. Being away
from Dayton we see we are visiting air shows, the dead
in their sky-blue uniforms. We’re embarrassed at having
fallen into place in yet another long, slow-moving line
of outerbelt traffic past new-development bare fields.
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