Gary Glauber
Inside Outrage
by Gary Glauber
Finalist for The Eric Hoffer Book Award:
The Medal Provocateur
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Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He has five collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press), Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), Rocky Landscape with Vagrants (Cyberwit), A Careful Contrition (Shanti Arts Publishing) and most recently, Inside Outrage (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), an Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur finalist. He also has two chapbooks, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press) and The Covalence of Equanimity (SurVision Books), a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize.
Across from the Fig Tree
You think someone is coming
to save this quotidian day,
but the earthquake has other plans.
So you sit by the window
and watch the rain come down,
wishing for company.
Every day spent thus
is time invested in a life,
wisely or unwisely.
So you tell yourself lies
about science and math,
and refill your shot glass.
It burns your throat
in a way that confirms life,
trading one proof for another.
You watch a video about feathers,
but you have no desire to fly.
You’re almost a statue now.
Frozen in position
from an ex-lover’s glance,
hurling daggers of extinction.
from an ex-lover’s glance,
hurling daggers of extinction.
You realize the fabric of reality
is as thin as a spider’s web,
as tenuous as the weather.
Perhaps you never were born,
this whole imagined fiasco
still as a fallen feather.
You know no one is coming,
for you see that nothing is real
and the earth never happened.
And if nature is all illusion.
do stars really light the sky?
Somewhere a tractor starts
with a yawn, a doorbell rings.
The rain has stopped.
You look in the mirror
and you’re covered in feathers:
surrounded, overcome.
Once again confounded, undone.
