A List

Poem by Nels Hanson

First I ever heard of it was as a child, 
story of my grandfather’s first cousin,
the two best friends growing up. Forty

years ago he clamped the revolver in 
a vice and tied its trigger aimed at him 
with string to the cellar door so his wife 

would fire it when he failed to answer
her call. My mother’s old classmate at
college left alone by a wayward husband

with two young daughters asked Mother 
if she’d take them, later did kill herself. 
The high school typing teacher, three fine

Arabians, divorced, going blind after four 
failed surgeries, tied a rope to the closet’s
dowel. Widowed ditch tender who drove 

a blue Jeep and we gave boxes of plums 
because his wife had cancer couldn’t go
on after her death. One long-haired boy I 

never spoke to, saw maybe twice outside 
the office of the kind professor, I heard
stepped off a tall building in Los Angeles, 

what reason I never learned or asked. Not
far down our country road the winter day 
a troubled farming friend started his new 

truck in a closed garage, the warning sign 
Deadly Fumes painted on metal door? And 
another, brain hurt in football, rode a bike 

right along the white line at night, head-on 
hit a highway patrolman’s racing car. Deaf 
man I hadn’t seen since he was 12 leaped 

from the Golden Gate Bridge the week his 
first girlfriend and his roommate became 
lovers. By chance on a Sunday I noticed 

in The Chronicle, obituaries column. There
were others, way too many, the decorated
Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam I met in

fourth grade turned his pistol on himself 
when a woman left him, from the gurney 
whispering to a brother she wasn’t worth 

it. Thirteen I knew I counted once felt life
too hard, too strange but I’ve told enough 
for a year, a day, any life of mine or theirs.

About the writer

Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nomination.