Damned and Not Yet Thirty
Audrey Friedman

He clings to a dead palomino on the Crescent Park carousel that has been hanging in limbo from high on a brass pole for more than a year. Its white paint is peeling from its flanks in sheaths, but like a vessel no longer deemed seaworthy, no one has the heart to kill it just yet. The garland gripping its throat is as barely there as an old bruise, and this fascination with fading is what made him the sixty-third flying steed stuck amidst the chariots.

Author's Note

Audrey Friedman is a Literacy Coach at the Quidnessett Elementary School in North Kingstown, RI. She received her MFA from Vermont College in January 2005. Her chapbook, Gallery of the Surreal, was published by the Premier Poets Press. Audrey's poetry has been published in numerous journals such as the Newport Review, Comstock Review, The Griffin, Urban Spaghetti, and the California Quarterly, and has been anthologized in Little Pear Press's Regrets Only.