Our poet for this edition of the “Lyrical” is the late Ron Schreiber. Schreiber was a founding editor of the “Hanging Loose Press,” a U/Mass professor, a Gay activist, and for a long time a Somerville resident before he moved to Cambridge.The poem we selected “Somerville Saturday Night,” was from the anthology “Present Tense: Poets In The World,” (Hanging Loose Press, 2004). For more information about this book go to: www.hangingloosepress.com. To have your poems considered for the “Lyrical Somerville” send them to: Doug Holder 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143 dougholder@post. harvard.edu

Somerville Saturday Night

four teenaged girls walk down the middle of the Boston-Maine tracks. no trains in sight. they smoke cigarettes & jostle one another. I walk on the sidewalk, 100 feet above them. Two people a year get killed by the trains.

In Somerville there are no parks or playgrounds except for patches of concrete with baskets. sometimes there are parking lots. boxcars rest on a siding where meat packing plants used to be; the cars

are empty. they could be relics in a railroad museum. more people get killed crossing the street than walking the rails.

a young man has tracks in his arms. his father used to work in one of the plants; he’s unemployed & has emphysema. he coughs day & night. he owns his own house, & his front lawn is paved & painted green. there’s a plaster Virgin in the middle of the yard.

his second son is gay & lives at home but goes into town to the bars every night. everybody knows about the sons, & no one cares–they’re local.

the sun begins to set. I cross the street, looking for speeding cars or stolen cars with 14 -year -old drivers, who bash them into other cars, get out & run. Somerville Saturday Night.