Story
Alphanumerica
Robert C. Hardin
The streets were numbered forward and the avenues backward, so that you began at H and walked until you reached the first letter. Then the next avenue, like the first street, began a forward count from one to two and so on....
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Essay
After the Ash-White Wind
Robert C. Hardin
9/11/01: 8:54 a.m.
My shift has ended and I’m sitting at my computer, finessing a letter to Swedish musician, Tomas Pettersson. Looking out of an eighteenth-story window off Maiden Lane, I notice what might have passed ...
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Poem
Prismed Autumn (an Imitation)
Robert C. Hardin
Prismed Autumn (an Imitation)
You who denigrate the Fall as nature’s end:
Have you beheld the brilliance of its dying?
It is not cloaked in mourning,
weighted by some sable hood,
but nakedly chromatic, varie...
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Story
Welcome to All the Pleasures
Robert C. Hardin
My father liked to say that I’d always been impossible to find. During birth, he recalled, I couldn’t be extracted with forceps. No one could see me, so I made my own way out of my mother. The midwife only located me aft...
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Essay
Drone Loops and the Signature of Bliss
Robert C. Hardin
The experience of bliss means different things to different people. For this frustratingly former arranger and studio keyboard player, euphoria is conditioned by the search for perfect sounds.
To me, bliss means the slow...
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Poem
For an Infant in the Throes of a Fatal Condition
Robert C. Hardin
Cirrhosis isn’t half as bad
As maladies you might have had.
A failing liver strains the muscles
But liberates the red corpuscles.
When voided kidneys soak one’s dollies,
Relief, like spasms, comes in volleys.
Rope-...
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Review
The Antisocial Butterfly – a review of Jill Rapaport’s “Duchamp et Moi”
Robert C. Hardin
It begins with a withered Dadaist and parents. In the title story of Jill Rapaport’s new collection, Duchamp et Moi, a French-Romanian pop and painter mom learn that their favorite creaking enfant terrible is in town. ...
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Story
The Soul of the Doll
Robert C. Hardin
Being the Recollections of a Late Inmate (1931–1946) of the Dalmarnock Asylum for Children in Glasgow, Scotland
The eyes were what changed and flayed me above all else—the eyes or, rather, the doll’s eye...
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Dag-a-Man Leanty’s Dumpe1
Robert C. Hardin
(hav’ na byn compos’d by Byffe, Bairn an’ Nagel, nae dead a’ sea)2
Aie, nae, dance th’ auld dag-a-man leanty3
Er mae yer goggles a-cyrl,
An’ slag-a-mum4 dyne
On th’ bulgewark o’ thyne,
Wharfor’...
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Essay
Words for My Mother’s Funeral
Robert C. Hardin
Her loveliness grew to encompass her gentleness as the span of Heaven is multiplied by the depth of its city of souls.
Leah Hardin was a woman who treasured her family above all else. Long after desire and ambition had be...
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Story
Merthiolate (and Other Futile Antiseptics)
Robert C. Hardin
Merthiolate
After failing to kill myself for the eighteenth time, I decided to be more positive. Why focus on failure? I thought. Why not appreciate the character added by damage to my once-perfect body? But despite the p...
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