{"id":432,"date":"2011-11-05T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-05T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=432"},"modified":"2011-11-05T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-11-05T12:00:00","slug":"ben-rasnics-scenes-from-an-earlier-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/ben-rasnics-scenes-from-an-earlier-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Rasnic's 'Scenes from an Earlier Life'"},"content":{"rendered":"
Scenes from an Earlier Life <\/span>
(Lee Theater, Pennington Gap, Va.)
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Before sealing its doors in \u201978
it was THE place to be Saturday nights,
line forming from the ticket booth stretching
down Morgan Avenue, flexed and undulating
like a human centipede;
 
where checking out who was there with whom
and sometimes who was not there with whom
but with someone else
actually provided more entertainment
than the library of Elvis Presley flicks
and spaghetti westerns we had come to view.<\/p>\n

And once inside, would breathe in
that familiar smell, the unmistakable marriage
of English Leather cologne and mildew
challenging the senses
as well as the stale but sweet mask
of hot buttered popcorn and licorice sticks
always waiting there for us
like the bubble gum & Bit-o-Honeys
stuck to the underside of upholstered cushion seats.<\/p>\n

Yet when the majestic velvet curtain
would at long last draw open
to unveil the mammoth canvas screen
to the creaking whir of projector,
the chill bumps on my arms could not be denied
as reels and reels of spliced, grainy film
played out their final respective shelf lives<\/p>\n

while real life was being played out
in the balcony atop the carpeted stairwell
that spiraled back in time to Jim Crow,
now occupied by na\u00efve white adolescents
fumbling with buttons, clasps and zippers;<\/p>\n

nervous whispers and heavy breathing      
scoring raw footage from unfinished lives
permanently archived in the flickering light.<\/p>\n

*Ben Rasnic<\/span> is originally from Jonesville, a small rural town in extreme Southwest Virginia, population <1000. Currently, Ben resides in Bowie, Maryland and earns a paycheck as an accountant for a paper recycling company in Alexandria, Va. A small portion of his leisure time is spent creating poems that can be found on numerous internet websites and a few \u201cold school\u201d printed publications.
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Scenes from an Earlier Life (Lee Theater, Pennington Gap, Va.) Before sealing its doors in \u201978it was THE place to be Saturday nights,line forming from the ticket booth stretchingdown Morgan Avenue, flexed and undulating like a human centipede; where checking out who was there with whom and sometimes who was not there with whom but with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}