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.
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