By Oz Hardwick

The theater was built by children, their small hands towering bricks with unlikely precision. The design came from a competition on a TV show that was popular at the time, though no one remembers it now, on which there was a weekly segment with a talking dog. The dog headlined the theatre’s opening night, groomed beyond perfection as it spoke of the way that we — the kids who crowded the plush auditorium — were the future, and that the arts, as much as putting a man on the Moon (it must have been the 60s) would shape a world, and possibly a whole Space Federation, in which every one of us would be happy forever. It was the first time in my life that I cried for joy. And it was my first — and so far only — brush with celebrity as, later that evening, I bumped into the dog along the seafront, sniffing around outside the penny arcade. He gave me an inky pawprint in my autograph book, and he gave me the sort of look that humans can only aspire to, as he assured me that every word he’d said was true.
Of course, he’s long gone and forgotten, the arcade’s boarded up, and the theatre’s falling down; but I read the papers, I watch the News, I doom scroll through worsening catastrophes, and I know who I’d rather believe.

By Oz Hardwick

I carry my mother in the palm of my hand. The obvious simile is a bird — or, more specifically, a blue
hummingbird — but I don’t want to go there yet. Instead, I’ll explore the image of a jeweller’s branded
box, with lettering like a 60s cigarette packet or a tissue leaf from a box of chocolate mints you’d only buy for special occasions. It’s the kind that holds a ring on a plush scarlet cushion. Sometimes it’s a sparkler for the peak of a giddy dream, at others it’s the ordinary beauty which will ache with love for year after year after year. But what of the box? To a child, it can hold a treasure of plastic, a phalanx of troops, a susurration of seashells, a bouquet of bears’ eyes, an epiphany of planets. And this one? This one? This one cups a blue egg in scarlet plush. Because it’s a bird. It was always a bird.

By Jane Simon

Every day a new hurdle to define,
then climb. Do not despair but take
within that hair of being; it is our
quandary to tarry, and hope to expose
another angle, to spur a novel answer
to this never–ending series of hurdles,
that our friends, the long–lived turtles
with aplomb, cope, lumber and master.

By Jane Simon

Marianne, the Octopus and History
Conversation from 81st to 74 th St.

On our chilly walk down CPW last night
past the Museum of Natural History
now devoid of the bold bronze statue
of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback.

How sad that our country wants
to disown history, Marianne remarks.

Like the Chinese, I say, remembering
my travels in China; there entire
ancient cities were torn down and buried.

What does it mean that we’ve become
like the Chinese wanting to disown history? I query.

I guess we’ll wait and see,
Marianne says thoughtfully.

Then she relates how last night she watched
a TV show about octopuses and learned that females
of the species devour their partners after they mate.

How odd, I say. I never knew that.

Not all of them, Marianne consoles.
Just one variety.

Oh, that’s a relief, I answer.
But how does she kill him?

Like a pragmatist, she reports,
I guess she eats him.

like a pathologist searching
for the cause of death, I ask,
but how does she murder him?

I guess she strangles him, Marianne conjectures.
They have a lot of legs, you know.

Oh, I sigh and say, I guess that explains it.
Then I hum to myself, wondering if we
(on our walk) have explained anything at all.