The Shelter Series: Liam Callanan – Escaping with Nathan McClain

Today, locked in our house, I hear Nathan McClain’s “Houdini” in a different way from when I first heard him read it, different still from when I first read it on the page, different, like everything else, from yesterday. “Who would’ve known you’d grow so afraid of stillness, / enclosed spaces, that you’d no longer remember a time you weren’t / subtracting seconds from your life, as if each breath were held?” the poem begins and each line after winds its way around the listener, tighter and tighter, Once I loved, with shivery pleasure, how the boy at the end of the poem slips free of the poem with his plea, “Mom, can I please be a ghost, please?” But today I want him to stay. I want to keep him, my own family, this poem, close and not let go.