The Valentine Theater

 I was in my hometown recently and for the first time since the 1970s I went inside the Valentine. It is a church now. The screen is gone, replaced by a stage. The projection booth is now a small meeting room. The clickety clack of the projector having been silenced by technology, low profits and soft talk and prayer. The smell of popcorn is missing, as is the buzz of a couple hundred folks waiting for a movie to roll. But, all in all, the feeling of the building is much as it was nearly forty years ago.

 The Valentine Theater

The air in the balcony

lugged the thickness of puke,

the sting of piss and the belch

of decay to the top of the stairs

and heaved it against every face.

It punched like the old usher’s glare.

It was a sideshow,

with its booger-crusted arm rests

and, if rumors were to be believed,

soggy puddles on stiff velvet seats

waiting to be sopped up by the ass

of your  favorite blue jeans.

It was a main feature

of willing lips and anxious tongues

and fingers climbing the rungs

of love, to the beat

of a clicking projector.

And as a parting gift, a wad

of  Kleenex  for young men to stuff

over their noses and try to separate

the smell of perfume from the sweet

odor of boob.

The Valentine Theater originally appeared in Clapboard House literary journal