DIME NOVEL
Up in the attic in a humpback trunk,
That I was rummaging through,
I found a ten-cent, paperback novel
From nineteen thirty-two.
Its dog-eared pages were wrinkled and brown
And papered with flecks of mold.
So I smoothed them down and brushed them off
To see what tale they told.
Across the cover ran a black freight train,
With a billowing head of steam,
Bearing down on a girl, tied fast to the tracks,
Illumed in the headlight’s beam.
Nearby was a hassock so I pulled it close
And, there by a chink of light,
I started to read from the first brown page
The whole of that young girl’s plight.
The story began on a Kansas farm,
On a dark September morn,
When a twister funneled down from the sky,
Destiny was on her brow,
And fame was in her breast,
While across the sea three felons met
In a cellar in Budapest.
And while they plotted, a ship set sail
From a port in Cameroon
With a bamboo crate lashed to her deck
That caged a white baboon,
While over the horizon a pontoon plane
Set down on a hidden lake
On a lonely isle where a cannibal chief
Meanwhile at a table in a back-alley dive,
In a village on the Caspian Sea,
A fortune was won in a baccarat game
By a gambler from Tennessee.
Now all of the above, on the very next page,
(But I won’t tell you how it was done)
Was brought together, and everything fit—
And that was just Chapter One!
Ventura, California
John Gentry, 76, of Ventura, California is a retired public school teacher who also served in the U. S. Navy. He is currently an active participant in a local seniors creative writing group, and exhibits a great gift for storytelling in his award-winning narrative poem “Dime Novel.” He has raised five adopted children and has two grandchildren. His astrological sun sign is Taurus.