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.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Her laughter escalated
into muted hysteria,
lasting a second too long,
like an unfortunate accident,
a gasp, an inhalation
with throat muscles constricting,
breasts heaving,
shoulders shaking.
A moment of mirth
escaped unawares,
triggered by happenstance,
initially apologized for,
then later
subtly savored.
by Gary Glauber
Gary Glauber is a poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. His works have received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. In 2013, he took part in Found Poetry Review’s Pulitzer Remix Project. He champions the underdog to the melodic rhythms of obscure power pop. His collection, Small Consolations, is coming from The Aldrich Press in 2015.
April 2015 | back-issues, poetry
Getting to know you
How do you feel about thunderstorms?
I realize I have no idea how you’d answer.
My cheeks burn;
the thunder cracks;
it must be a sign.
I miss a lover I don’t know
and the thunder is judging me.
Have you ever
tried to write a poem
and the poem won’t write
but its lines keep insisting themselves to you?
I’m being silly.
It’s storming and I’m blushing and
I don’t know you
but I know you don’t write.
The thunder snorts
and the poem about you keeps insisting itself to me.
burning.
when you kissed me,
did your fingertips
feel like lightning?
No,
i guess that was
just me.
Thunder.
Shame on you for making me feel something.
Shame on me for thinking it meant something.
So
how do you feel about thunderstorms
and relationships that won’t go anywhere
poetry
and me?
The thunder is crackling now,
cackling now,
but I don’t think it’s laughing at us.
by Daniele Walker
October sixteenth
The world in which I am living
is not the world in which I woke up
this morning,
because you are not in it.
The world is not the same,
and I didn’t even get to say goodbye
to it
or to you.
This kind of sadness is how I imagine drowning like you did.
And I wonder if it hurt.
And I wonder if you were afraid.
And I wonder
if
you knew
what was coming.
And I wonder if you knew that I loved you.
by Daniele Walker
Daniele DeAngelis Walker is twenty-three years young, but her soul feels much older. An avid lover of colors and words, she graduated from Drew University with specialized honors in creative writing. She works in the publishing industry and lives in New Jersey with the fiancée she never thought she’d have.
