Moving Home When That Means to Newnan and You’re 25
Challenger
by Daniel Conan
eighth grade early afternoon, Body neither awake nor tired
think of this place only as a space with too few bars. Prepare to drive familiar streets, past a museum that seemed never open when you were interested, past houses old enough to mean unburnt in Georgia and every day to see your father’s car. forget and forget counting. Prepare to hear “There’s no shame [in living with your mother]” and learn it’s so. Make excuses (wrong place, wrong time, underemployment statistics, predatory lending, etc.), all subprime, none a reason. Don’t accept excuses. exercise patience while driving: use your horn, gesture, but don’t yell yourself hoarse as someone refuses to turn left on red onto and from a one-way. take your car to its home service station that was a BP before and its fuel affiliation now, forget; know there will be no mechanic anxiety. Prepare to offer people you once knew or knew of a knowing smile and nod in the grocery store: don’t no-look, know you will no-look. learn not to look for implications (boy-man, arrested development, etc.) in “millennial.” Occasionally work in your mother’s yard. Be emotionally available. Be willing to forge new experience. Avoid old digs, old judgments. Avoid the paper’s “Community Forum” or prepare for blood pressure meds. Walk around with headphones in your ears. Pick a piece of sidewalk: remember then and list the differences. in public, speak only to people you’ve never met before. Celebrate the lack of bars and, therefore, the lack of guilt for only ever going to one. Don’t remember high school. Forget the high school’s tennis courts and its tantrums. Forget humiliations suffered; those inflicted, only enough to avoid repetition. Avoid any “reunion,” especially unofficial and at the Court Square’s dive, an old theater with its marquee reading down two stories from the top: the alamo. as in remember: avoid saying too much, avoid drinking too much, avoid saying “forget The Alamo,” say too much, avoid self-judgment. Don’t take advice. Offer advice. Be alone. Enjoy a screened porch and enjoy screen time. Be emotionally unavailable. Sit on a swing. Sit on a glider. People watch. Drink less. Refuse any social function that requires etiquette. Be kind. Forget that you’ve ever lived here before. Remember losing your father’s Boy Scout knife in the ivy four houses down. Know you have lost — forget this list. shoot hoops and play tennis; remember losing to your father: those miracles of wile and poise. ABOUT THIS POEM: Moving home is so emotionally confusing because much of what you encounter in your house, neighborhood, town solicits a complex emotional response stemming from years of attached memory. Willful manipulation of these associations, dismissing or subverting some while promoting, focusing on others, is a way you can achieve or approach emotional clarity. NCM
DANIEL cONAN grew up in downtown Newnan and graduated from Newnan High School. Over the years, close friends — many from his neighborhood — excellent teachers and his family helped foster his appreciation of literature. This appreciation grew at the University of Georgia, where he studied poetry and fiction. His search for inspiration currently has him back in Newnan.
by Leverett Butts
Math class, algebra homework i hadn’t done secretly scribbling answers as given Can’t have another zero across the room, a boy reads a book instead homework forgotten i stare at the cover all black and grays a hint of red in the center the sink of envy as i watch he doesn’t care about zeros he does his own work Gets all the right answers all the time and the book. Kid in the hall runs “she blowed up! they all dead! Ever mother’s son of ’em!” homework forgotten, We tumble to the hall teacher wipes her face, stumbles to assembly i am last out. that was years ago. they say it was o-rings scattered astronauts, teachers, students to the wind today on my bookshelf a book i’ve had since the eighth grade NCM
LEVEREtt Butts
teaches composition and literature at the Gainesville campus of the University of North Georgia. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Eclectic and The Georgia State University Review. He’s written a collection of short fiction, “Emily’s Stitches: The Confessions of Thomas Calloway and Other Stories,” and a novella, “Guns of the Waste Land: Departure.” january/february 2014
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