April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
I sat among the books and the shelves rattled and shook
The covers flying open as the words wrestled their way out, shattering the air with a collective shout,
Settling down into a song the words took shape, rising and falling each one struggling to find it’s space
The melody began, drifting, dancing
Lazily the tune took me like a stream, each turn and bend showing me a new dream
The harmony joined in, as I looked upon the banks and saw the rolling hills and fields ready to be filled with whatever my mind could make
The stronger words decided to have their turn, as the stream gained strength and a river was born
Dropping me down in frigid waters, and the song was gone and the only sound was the chatter of my teeth
Then I burst through again, and drawing breath, riding the crest of the wave, I found myself at the sea and knew I could stay afloat
As the sun warmed my skin, I heard the sweet hymn once more, and looked out and saw forever stretched across the shore
by Crawford Krebs
Crawford Krebs is eighteen years old and lives in South Carolina.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Self-help book publishers
Looking for old answers
In new packaging
Of crafty cover art
Catered to mid-life upstarts
Caught up in life’s heist
Stealing unpredictable
Trust fund diamonds
Hiding from the sun’s glare
Seeks futility’s self-awareness
Posing as repressed confessions
Yet still contributes to yearly profits
by Charlie Weeks
Charlie Weeks is the type of guy who writes with any liquid poison soaking in his mind. He has been recently published in lit mags such as the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg review and Summer edition of Haunted Waters.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
In every family photograph
I see what isn’t there,
the change in my face,
my father’s gestures,
my mother’s hair.
I search through the box of photographs
for evidence. The fights we didn’t hear.
The book and its damning inscription.
Do I imagine the rift in the photograph,
the four of us on the couch in Texas at Grandpa’s house?
Mom is holding me still
her hands on my upper arms
as I lean toward the edge of the frame.
Eddie is resting against Dad,
his whole body balanced,
a weight on my father’s knee.
Dad leans away.
Mom looks dazed, her smile as static
as the turned up ends of her plastered hair.
I read an article years ago about how you could
tell which Hollywood stars were breaking up
by paying attention to body language in candid photographs.
Do I imagine our demise
in the way my parents lean away from each other,
in the way my brother tries to hold them still,
in the way I struggle to escape?
by Lori Gravley
Lori Gravley writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She earned her MFA from the University of Texas at El Paso. She has published poems and essays in a variety of journals, including Flights, Ekphrasis, and Mock Turtle Zine. She has work forthcoming in Crack the Spine and I-70 Review. She lives just outside of Yellow Springs, Ohio between a meadow and a cornfield.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
hide with me
in the unfinished corner
of creation
from Hannibal,
Busta Rhymes,
and Google
Matthew McConaughey
will have no power
until sundown.
we will play yahtzhee in the dark,
the dice with convex dots
so we can feel something
there are lightning bolts
in our eyes and we can split trees
by looking.
let’s read
the curvature
of the horizon
to each other
fingers thrust into the copper blood soil
your face deep in citrus and silver.
it’s dark but for your thoughts
and the full clouds.
by Akiva Savett
Akiva J. Savett’s poetry has been published in a chapbook entitled Preservation and appeared in The Orange Room Review, Poetry Quarterly, Kerem, Circa, The Red River Review, In Parentheses, Four And Twenty, The Eunoia Review, Etcetera, and was published in The Washington Post’s “Autobiography As Haiku.” He teaches English and Advanced Placement Literature at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland. He holds an MA in English from University of Delaware and lives in suburban Maryland with his wife Alison and two children.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
A man who confessed to being insane enough
a man who confessed to being insane enough
to live with beasts. that’s not fair to the beasts.
what he meant was human beings.
you could tell because he was obsessed with fire
rising between the trees, & there’s no beast
who comprehends this as obsessable— it is to be fled.
so he meant human beings. in any case,
he wasn’t the only prick in the world insane enough
to do what he confessed to, but we all brag in different
cadences; mostly he just makes me think: so what? &
beautiful… that’s beautiful…
i’ll tell you what: we only suffer
long enough to die alive. that’s all.
that’s enough reason to be insane. i, for my part, still prefer
beastly people to human beings, the living to the dead.
by Steven Fregeau
Here & Now
The age of silked pimps
Has ended; the age of the thug
Has begun.
The proof is in
The uneven thumping upstairs,
The angry shouts,
A fallen window,
Footsteps stamping down the ceiling plaster,
A broken bottle,
A slammed door unevenly shuddering back open into the hall,
A man’s feet on the stairs,
His jeans & Tshirt blurring through the December bushes,
His beater car peeling off,
& her weeping in the room above my bed
As the muffled radio pants for breath in the bathroom.
A cat peers in my window
& I throw a sock at it
Because it flirts with skunks
& the summer stink lingers
Like the smell of an unfaithful wife.
It is Christmastime & I have no work.
I hear the worst of it in the daytime.
Everyone else is at work.
They have families & ambitions of love.
Sometimes love isn’t enough.
Sometimes it is enough that the radio upstairs goes silent.
Sometimes the thugs
Make sense,
& that truly does hurt.
by Steven Fregeau
Steven lives in Canton, OH and enjoys red wines, whiskeys, art, poetry, music, etc., and time spent at dive bars talking to people who manage to get by in life somehow (neighbors). College was the biggest mistake he ever made successfully. Oh, well.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
I call my friend Alan to talk while I drive up the coast, past a friend’s house in Salem Center,
a friend I haven’t seen in almost a year. She is not dead, but I guess, I am dead
to her, or she to me since we only speak in space.
The Kernwood Bridge is up, letting a boat through on the Danvers River. I am stuck
by the street of another friend who’s gone and left, who lives across from a graveyard, honest,
no joke.
I ask Alan would it kill someone to jump off this bridge? No, but you might break a few bones.
How about the Beverly Bridge? It’s right there, up the river, all new sleek, it’s one of the few bridges left safe for me to
drive over. Yeah, that bridge will kill you. Once when we were all
friends, all alive, all clean, we ate at a clam shack there at the foot and saw the cops and
firetrucks
screaming to the high rails. That’s not how I’d do it, one of us said. And then we went back to
our chowder.
How about the Veterans’ Bridge over the Annisquam? I dreamed once my car drove right over
the edge, into that warm water that would take me out to Wingaersheek, and finally the Atlantic.
Oh yeah, broken into pieces, shattered. Like hitting cement, rock. But what are you going to do?
I want to keep asking him until I run out of bridges, all the way up to Maine, but the call drops
and my phone dies.
by Jennifer Martelli
Jennifer Martelli’s chapbook, Apostrophe, was published in 2010 by Big Table Publishing Company. Most recently, her work has been included in Bop Dead City, Cactus Heart, *82, and is forthcoming in Up the Staircase Quarterly and Jersey Devil Press. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her family and is an associate editor for The Compassion Project.
