July 2024 | nonfiction
Even since my mother-in-law died last year and we had to clean out her cottage at Nottingham Village retirement center, I have been trying to get rid of things. Maybe so my kids won’t have to go through boxes of stuff neither wants, or maybe so it will be easier when my wife and I move back to California.
My goal: two plastic bins and a small wooden filing cabinet.
The filing cabinet was, as expected, mostly papers. The first folder held the adoption papers for my two Pekingese, Kung-pao and Mushu, and eleven-years’ worth of vaccination forms. Kept their adoption papers and the most recent rabies certificate, recycled the rest. Under the folder, lying alone on the bottom of the drawer, was a dog collar with a license and rabies tag from 2003. It was Eggroll’s, my first Pekingese, adopted when I was twenty and lived alone, and the only thing I brought home from the vet that last time. The keep pile.
A folder of old publications, roughly a hundred book reviews I wrote for Public News, Houston’s underground newspaper, long defunct. Maybe I shouldn’t get rid of things when I’m depressed about my career—the last time I threw away the diplomas for my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. Trash, without even skimming them. The next folder contained twenty-year-old publication contracts for poems and my two critical books. I only save tax returns for three years, so I can’t see any need to retain these. Trash. The books and journals remain on my shelf.
After my daughter was born, my mother sent me a manila envelope of cards I had made when I was in grade school. In each, I drew a picture and wrote a poem—not a real poem, just sentences that rhymed. The drawings were atrocious as well. The world has enough bad poetry and art—trash—although I did keep a Christmas plate I made for my parents in first grade. I’ll let my kids laugh at my lack of artistic talent when they discard it.
A photograph of Larry. It was loose, alone in a folder and not in the envelope of Royal Ranger pictures with “Do Not Open” emblazoned on it. That should have been an easy call: fire. He’s smiling and doesn’t look like a sexual predator. I repressed those events for twenty years; my mother sent that envelope when I was trying to recover those blanks with my therapist. I’ve never mentioned any of this to my children. Maybe I’m trying to keep the worst parts of humanity a little further from them. The photo goes in the envelope with the warning, stashed in the back of the filing cabinet. What disposal is appropriate for such a record?
In one of the bins, my varsity letters from Pasadena Christian Junior High and Maranatha High School. I was mediocre at best, but managed to earn letters despite spending most of the games on the bench. My foray into athletics did not make me socially acceptable; everyone knew me as the paradigmatic math/science nerd. Trash. My high school Science and Math Award plaque from Bank of America and my pin from the California Math League return to the bin—my son, who will major in astrophysics, might appreciate those.
The final container represents my inheritance from my father’s parents. On top is my grandmother’s 1941 diploma from Dawson Springs High School in Kentucky—that meant more to her than any of mine did to me. I should frame it and put it on the wall in place of my PhD. A lot of pictures, candids from the Civil Air Patrol and the mission field, a couple of African newspapers mentioning my grandfather’s revival services. Beneath are faded portraits of unnamed ancestors, some dressed up and others in overalls. There’s no point in passing these on to my kids: they have no stories or dates. My family history is complicated enough with the relatives I can identify, religious colonialism and zealotry. As the oldest son of an oldest son of an oldest son, I am the unwitting repository of the Hardin family photo archive. I’ll cull this bin by half tomorrow.
One bag goes to the street as garbage and one to the Salvation Army. The dog collar stays on my desk—it can’t be buried in a folder.
Michael Hardin
Originally from Los Angeles, Michael Hardin lives in rural Pennsylvania. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Born Again, from Moonstone Press (2019), has had poems and flash CNF published in Seneca Review, Wisconsin Review, North American Review, Quarterly West, Moon City Review, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart.
July 2024 | poetry
Speak for yourself.
Bet on your own naked wanting,
which is also a losing dog.
Who are you to say I ever lived
a half-life? Like copacetic
isotopes of love.
What a waste of clean pain.
Oh well,
almost green with aliveness choosing
to say nothing over forgiveness.
Light falls over
an empty house like
you have ever been truthful.
What were you hoping for?
The Dogwood lights
easy as a lie.
What a goddamn shame.
You are nightless at heart,
a murmur of a lover
and also the rain.
And also the rain.
Hannah Cook
Hannah Cook is a 24-year-old poet, certified forklift driver, & rat girl. She loves reading, writing, crawling in your walls, and lying about innocuous things for fun. She received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Boise State University and is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2024. Her poetry concerns itself deeply with matters of desire, love, sex, self-annihilation, generational trauma, identity, and domestic abuse. While spilling recklessly with love and tenderness, her poems also speak to an unbearable, unavoidable thread of loneliness and grief as a condition of desire. Hannah rages, shamelessly, planting milkweed for the company of the final monarchs. Hannah loves, hauntingly, gathering yarrow for the lost.
July 2024 | poetry
In youth we dawdle over flesh in the water,
primed for our prime like an irreducible number.
Reaping dividends from Arctic melt, we look
to the parity of starlight and the perennial
rotation of ground-level fuel. Nefarious grains
grow row upon row on a landscape peppered
with invention. Noteworthy wings slip
echolocation. What do the bees stipulate, or
the last wolverine unbound from a glacier?
The hairline-fractured earth revises who and what exists.
Through rainout and burnout, animation erodes.
In senescence we dally with locked vertebrae. We seek
a strawberry asylum in which to nibble light transformed
into substance. We too are substance. Verifiably tasty.
Alan Elyshevitz
Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and five poetry chapbooks, most recently Approximate Sonnets (Orchard Street). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
July 2024 | poetry
Three First Grade Boys on the Titanic
Three boys squat
in the Book Corner
looking down
at the open heart of history.
One boy exclaims:
I wish I was on the Titanic.
Another replies with logic:
You can’t be on it.
A third who knows about attention
and the need to make an impact
to be noticed, to exist, states:
I was on the Titanic. I was. I was.
The two other boys don’t respond,
just keeping looking down at the picture
of the ship being sundered, closing
around the book like a prayer,
while the third, silently ousted,
wonders if his lie was in fact a kind of truth.
A Steiner Piano Shop
There’s a Steiner Piano Shop in Lake Oswego now.
The millionaires who wow the lake in record numbers,
in palaces policed by cameras, scraped and landscaped
by immigrant workers, stocked with pouty power boats
and gleaming Teslas can now insist their children clatter
through Mozart whilst they plan weekend wake-surfing
on the lake, too dirty to swim in, and family trips
to the Caribbean, second homes, thanking God
there’s no homeless camps and fentanyl addiction
in their downtown. Close the gate, security cameras on,
kids all tucked up with the latest fairy tale mirrors
while the dog roams its empty, echoing territory.
Matthew James Friday
Matthew James Friday is a British-born writer and teacher. He has published many poems in the US and international journals. His first chapbook, The Residents, will be published by Finishing Line Press in the summer of 2024. He has published numerous micro-chapbooks with the Origami Poems Project. Matthew is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. Visit his website at http://matthewfriday.weebly.com
July 2024 | poetry
My kid won’t go to school
anymore.
Morning finds her buried
in her sleep,
her father at her door
pleading.
We were violent at first,
me throwing off her covers, she
kicking.
She bit me once.
Now we have a pattern,
I beg
a short time through
her hollow door.
She clings to silence
til I’m gone.
She knows she’s wrong,
hates herself.
Retreating, I know
she’s right.
We scroll the same scenes
all day.
Presidents laughing
onstage
over bombs for Israel.
Yesterday
in Gaza, a food line
was shot to pieces.
Moms and kids.
And here?
A students crack,
C students
are doomed.
Last spring a classmate
jumped off,
a senior OD’d
this fall.
My brother’s kids were
locked down
last year while a classmate
shot
his homeroom.
The usual.
My daughter says she’s bored
by nature.
Waterfalls, canyons,
oceans.
Last year Mount Rainier,
she wants to
go back to the car
and sleep.
No longer sublime,
the world
holds no secrets.
Not even the laws that
govern us.
Only the dumb persistence
of atoms.
We understand they’re
in the Tube,
these kids. The Blitz above.
We adults
are afraid, our talk
dull bluster
in the dark. The kids
have seen this.
Life is a thing that wants
them dead.
Later I will bring
her lunch.
James Caton
James Caton is an emerging author whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Impossible Task, Arboreal, La Piccioletta Barca, and The MacGuffin. He is completing a book of poems, Nakba and Other Poems. He lives in Ann Arbor.
