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.
