by J.M.C. Kane
What’s left on the maple is everything that isn’t sound—
the brittle cast of seventeen years arriving at once,
unzipped along the spine like a childhood outgrown
standing up.
My sons used to pin them to their shirts like medals,
honors for outliving dirt.
We learned to tell noise from choir—
how a million throats can hold one note.
At dusk the yard is a museum of used names:
hollow, exact, faithful to the last knuckle.
The living climb higher, ecstatic and unbeautiful.
The shells remain, perfect at remembering.
I pocket one—light as the thought before it’s a word—
and whisper into it what I’m not brave enough
to say to the living:
come back if you can. If you can’t,
teach me how to leave the shape behind.
J.M.C. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk U.K.), a celebrated nonfiction work on cognitive patterning and inclusion in the workplace. Disabled, he writes from this learned experience as an ASD-1. His prose work has been published in more than a dozen literary journals and magazines. Kane admires compression the way some people admire tightrope walkers: from a safe distance, practicing only at home. He lives in New Orleans with his family in a house filled with paintings, dogs, and stories that unfold slowly.