An Open Arts Forum collection
What We Keep
Poems and photographs about family, possessions, and memory
A household can outlast the life that gave its objects meaning. Coats remain on their hangers, dishes wait in a cupboard, and a piece of jewelry passes into hands that would never have chosen it. Deciding what to keep becomes a way of thinking about the people who kept these things before us.
The works gathered here approach that experience from different directions. Sara Clancy opens a childhood closet; Sherry Cassells considers an inherited pendant; Thomas Yarbrough photographs his father's typewriter. Dale Patterson places remembered possessions beside the work of caring for another life, while Raymond Huffman asks what else we leave behind.
Affection and discomfort occupy the same rooms in this collection. Its objects can preserve a connection, carry an obligation, or prompt a question that remains unanswered long after the sorting is done.
In this collection
Read in order, or begin anywhere.
Poetry
The Hall Closet of Your Childhood Home
Sorting a childhood home's belongings unsettles the promise that clearing a space will simplify a life. Clancy lets ordinary household things summon family presences, making the closet an apt place to begin this collection.
Poetry
Statement Piece
A mother's pendant becomes a small, persistent question about inheritance and selfhood. Cassells attends to the distance between the jewelry one would choose and the jewelry one wants to keep close, allowing affection and resistance to coexist.
Photography
Corona
Yarbrough photographs the typewriter his father carried while working for a Georgia newspaper. Accompanied by a brief family recollection, the image gives a working object's weight and detail room to hold a much longer personal history.
Poetry
Her Mother’s Dishes
Care for an aging dog opens onto memories of maternal tenderness and loss. Patterson brings the inherited dishes into a poem concerned with how people sustain one another, and with the ordinary things that remain afterward.
Poetry
I Must Be Careful What I Leave
Huffman considers the traces a life leaves in other people: anger, encouragement, withheld kindness, and care. Closing the collection, the poem extends its question of inheritance beyond possessions to the consequences of our daily conduct.
Keep exploring
This collection is free to read. Help keep OAF publishing.