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TEMPORAL TOKENS
Our lives are made up of things that don’t last. Starting with childhood—that brief beginning to the years of adulthood—we outgrow clothes, move houses, leave friends, see the end of every summer when it’s time to go back to school. Holidays and other celebrations leave behind all kinds of ephemera: snapshots, birthday cards, first-place ribbons, Christmas ornaments, paper Valentines. So often, these end up in cardboard boxes, tucked into the corners of a basement or an attic.
My husband’s grandmother died recently, and it was strange to go through all the cupboards and rooms in her house, finding vinyl records and scraps of paper that were older than me. Death made a life itself seem ephemeral—including my own as I mused on the brevity of time—and yet these everyday objects continued on, outlasting their original owner.
In a downstairs closet, I’ve kept pieces of my own past: early drawings, report cards, pages of notes for poems, a stuffed penguin named Penny I got at SeaWorld. I think of all the books I’ve read, meals I’ve eaten, and sunsets I’ve seen—even more ephemeral than the objects in that closet. I consider, too, the strangely weightless pile of digital ephemera I’ve amassed: photos on my phone, drafts of my poetry in Word docs, every social media post I’ve made floating out in the world.
Though ephemeral means to last for a very short time, writing creates a kind of external memory, preserving these ordinary objects and hours in words. Inside this issue of Halfway Down the Stairs, you can find a wide range of ephemera: lists, fall leaves, shoebox keepsakes, a dropped hat, hometowns, abandoned dreams, and a couple on their wedding day, conjured from names on a headstone. You can revive the fleeting thoughts and emotions that accompanied crucial moments. You can even step into a post-apocalyptic future, one in which the world we know now has faded into the past.
Thank you to all the talented poets and writers who have contributed to the March issue! We hope you will enjoy their work.
The theme for our next issue is “Before & After,” and we will be open for submissions until May 1, 2024. We look forward to reading what you will send us!
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Phillip Watts Brown is a poetry editor at Halfway Down the Stairs.
© 2024, Phillip Watts Brown
Halfway Down the Stairs 