Sight Lines by Laura Matthias Bendoly & John Matthias

At the end of the world there will be a cinema. Its marquee will unreel our lives. This theater, however, will be shuttered. Maybe forever. The cineplex is an artefact of those times before. It reminds us that once we lived in a world where we laughed, held hands, and kissed each other. Tenderness came easy.
We celebrated our lives in unison
without reprimand or interdiction.
Once.
At the odeon that forever marked us.

– Laura Matthias Bendoly

Badland boys early up and
On the road in the spirit
Of modified Kerouac whose
Spirit might have spent the night
Near Sheephole Valley Wilderness
Or maybe at the Anza Borrego Park.
It’s a couple of hours before dawn
And the mountains are indifferent
To their rush and rant. But maybe
That’s not who they are. Maybe
It’s a yawning mother taking her
Daughter to the first music lesson
Of the day. The old woman who
Once played in Paris likes to start
Early. If you approach her small
House in the hills and it’s still dark
You hear the piano, or perhaps
You see her waiting on her porch
As the sun begins to rise.

-John Matthias

LAURA MATTHIAS BENDOLY  is a photographer and author of novel-length fiction. Her three titles include The Estate (2015), Laerka (2017), and The Peddler of Wisdom (2018). She is best known for landscape and environmental photography shot in the Midwest, where she lives, as well as in the desert Southwest. Her photography is self-taught, though she earned an MFA from Western Michigan University in creative writing as well as an MA in art history from Indiana University. Laura lives in Ohio with her family, and her cat, though she has lived variously in Indiana, Chicago, Michigan, France, the UK, and the Czech Republic.

To see more of Laura’s work, visit: https://www.laurabendoly.com

JOHN MATTHIAS has published some thirty books of poetry, translation, criticism, & scholarship. For many years he taught at the University of Notre Dame, where he is still Editor at Large of Notre Dame Review. Shearsman Books publishes his three volumes of Collected Poems, as well as the uncollected long poem, Trigons, his two most recent volumes of shorter poems, Complayntes for Doctor Neuro and Acoustic Shadows, two books of memoirs and literary essays, and the novel Different Kinds of Music. Two collaborative books have been published by Dos Madres: Revolutions (with Jean Dibble and Robert Archambeau) and Regrounding a Pilgrimage (with John Peck). His most recent books are Some Words on Those Wars (Dos Madres, 2021) and Living with a Visionary (Dos Madres, 2021).