Bruce Bennett is the author of nine books and more than twenty poetry chapbooks. His most recent full-length collections are Something Like Karma (Clandestine Press, 2009) and Subway Figure (Orchises Press, 2009), and his most recent chapbook is Visitation: A Sequence of Sonnets (FootHills Publishing, 2009). Two new chapbooks are forthcoming in 2010: a selection of rhymed fables, The Bestial Floor, in a letterpress edition from Wells College Press, and The Holding Stone, from Finishing Line Press. He was a founding editor of two magazines, Field and Ploughshares, and has reviewed contemporary poetry for The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He is Professor and Chair of English and Director of Creative Writing at Wells College in Aurora, New York, where he also directs the college's Visiting Writers Series.
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A GHOST IN THE ROOM
“There’s a ghost in the room!”
exclaimed a woman.
A man looked startled.
“What are you talking about?”
She gripped his hand.
“I can see it! I can sense it!”
Her eyes narrowed.
“And it’s a woman.”
His eyes darted about.
Then he smiled.
“There’s nothing here.
There’s no one.”
He patted her hand.
“It’s your imagination.”
She placed her other hand
on his, eyeing him shrewdly.
“No. It’s yours.”
HEARING NOTHING
“What was that?” said a woman.
“Nothing,” said a man.
“That,” she said. “What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“I told you,” he said. “It’s
nothing.”
She peered at him.
“Are you telling me the truth?”
He stared back at her.
“It isn’t anything.”
She peered now still more
intently.
He laughed.
“Why in the world would I
not tell the truth about not
hearing something?”
Her eyes remained locked
onto his.
“Yes. Why would you?”