Good of Him
- Good of Him
He enjoyed pressing a pillow over my face until I couldn’t breathe. He wasn’t mean, just having fun. He always lifted the soft weapon before I died, which was good of him. I paid him back one night while he was sleeping by creeping into his dark room clutching a long throwing knife and trying to look like a crazed killer. I hovered over his dreaming growing body until he woke screaming. I laughed so hard I cried. Boy was that fun, for me, until he slugged my arm and I dropped the knife and ran. That’s how it felt to love and be loved by a big brother back then. [End Page 12]
R. Steve Benson studied poetry at the University of Northern Iowa with the late poet James Hearst, who was a friend of Paul Engle, founder of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost also stayed at Hearst’s home in Cedar Falls. Like the Tennyson brothers back in 1827, Steve and his brother Barry have published a collection of their poems—Schooled Lives: Poems by Two Brothers (1st World Publishing, Blue Light Press). Steve has had more than twenty poems published in the Christian Science Monitor. Other poems have appeared in MARGIE, Poet Lore, Poem, the Hollins Critic, Spoon River Poetry Review, Snowy Egret, the North American Review, and many others. Steve is a retired art teacher, married with three children.
