Everything I Have Scavenged in My Backyard, in Chronological Order by Sarp Sozdinler

Sunglasses grimy with dust. Pencil sharpeners from different eras.
A VHS recording of my seventh birthday. A German money bill from over a century ago.
A Zippo lighter with the coat of arms of Berlin printed on its body.
Near-mint issues of Superman inside plastic containers. Used-up Stanley rolls.
A fist-sized piece of the Columbia space shuttle, which possibly fell off from the igniters.
A deck of hole-punched polaroids documenting some of the symbolic landmarks in our town, 
including the old radio tower where I lost my virginity in the bushes out front the day 
I turned thirteen. Three miniature brass pigeons wrapped in a crate. 
Two cases of live ammo purchased from competing gun stores downtown. 
My kid brother’s missing tooth from when Chad, my mother’s pothead boyfriend, 
beat the shit out of him. The trident my mom cut out of a cardboard box 
to make it up to Chad the day before our last Halloween together. Plastic chalices 
pretending to be silver or pewter. A waterlogged, mud-caked phonebook 
with the entire sections of my father’s initials gone missing. A torn one-way bus ticket 
to Saguache, Colorado. The wristwatch my mother gave me as a gift, 
still ticking away after a quarter of a century. 
Her body.

A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, Vestal Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Lost Balloon, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Wigleaf Top 50. He's currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.