"Roadside Suicides" by Jack
Conway
Use of the breakdown lane is prohibited.
“People that I know somehow are hanging themselves from
bridges.”
“You’ve got to figure, something must be wrong,”
she said. “It goes
back a long, long time but the latest was just forty-one. Hung
himself
beneath a bridge leading to where the kids walk into school.”
“As a
rule this doesn’t happen much,” she said. “A
teacher. Not too prudent
either. Was calling up a student in his class. Fourteen years
old. Made
calls directly to her house asking how she felt and if she ever
had a cock
inside her mouth.” “ I can’t imagine what that’s
about,” she said. “Ah
sweet bird of youth but in truth he’s not the first I know
about. In
high school, 1968, Eddie What’s-His-Face hung himself. From
an overpass,
senior year. He could pass for white all right but wanted to be
loved not
liked like a friend by a girl with skin the color of a pearl.
I remember
then it caused a huge sensation. They didn’t even read his
name at
graduation. “I shouldn’t be so impatient,” she
said. “There was a rumor
then about how his dick was hanging out. Eddie What’s-His-Name
hanging
from the westbound lane.” “This is insane,”
she said. “He’s not the last.
In economics class my professor Jack, retired from the Air Force,
came
back to teach. Wrote poetry. Never left behind a parting word.
Hung
himself from a covered bridge inside the nature preserve behind
his
house. Said he was emotionally unsteady. Had a cute little place
though
along the lake. Let me stay there once with her alone. Never once
mentioned Eddie. As if he didn’t exist.” “You
have to wonder what’s to blame
for this,” she said. “Now the last of it I’ll
try to fit together as best I can.
It was Eddie’s younger brother, forty one, who hung himself
below the bridge
leading to the school who called the girl who was the daughter
of the mother
of pearl. And he had Jack in economics class I know. Pretty strange
I’d say.”
“Don’t get too close. That’s the way accidents
occur,” she said. “People that I
know somehow are hanging themselves from bridges and the ties
that bind,
bind more than suicide somehow.” “Oh good, the traffic’s
moving now,” she said.
Jack Conway
Jack Conway's poems have appeared in Poetry, The
Antioch Review, The Columbia Review, Rattle,
Yankee, The Potomac and The Norton Anthology
of Light Verse among others. He is a 2006 Pushcart Prize
nominee and he is the author of, My Picnic With Lolita and
Other Poems, published by North Country Press. He teaches
at the University of Massachusetts and Bristol Community College.
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