CNF: Living Beneath
by Richard Hurst
I grew up in Levittown, Pennsylvania, under rows of Norway maples that made a ceiling out of summer. I thought that was how neighborhoods worked. Shade laid in gentle curves, sidewalks lifting where roots insisted, leaves thick enough to quiet whatever tried to grow beneath them.
I did not know I was living inside something planted all at once. Sometimes I slipped past the rows into small woods the builders had missed. The air cooled. The light split. Tulip poplars rose straight into the sky.
Red oaks held the ground in a way I could feel without understanding. Beech stood pale and smooth, like a room that asked for silence. Sweet birch carried the faint scent of wintergreen.
These places felt older than anything I knew how to name. Back in my neighborhood, the maples spread wide and shallow, covering everything. I lived beneath them without knowing what they had replaced.
Even then, something remained. A single poplar behind a fence. A beech at the edge of a schoolyard. A red oak holding its ground. I noticed them without knowing why.
Now I understand what remained.
Richard Hurst is a writer who recently retired from a patrol position with the Minneapolis Park Police and now works seasonally as a ranger in New Mexico’s Gila country. His work explores public space, memory, landscape, and the fragile structures that hold people together. His writing has appeared in the Minnesota Reformer, MinnPost and Núvol, with forthcoming work in Smoky Blue Literary & Arts Magazine, Star 82 Review and Thin Places Journal.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Living Beneath”? “Living Beneath” began with a memory I didn’t understand for years. I grew up in Levittown, Pennsylvania, one of the postwar suburbs built by William J. Levitt. Our neighborhood streets were lined with rows of Norway maples planted all at once, and as a child I assumed that was simply what woods looked like. Levitt left space within his neighborhoods for churches. Ours was a small Church of the Brethren, a peace church. My parents weren’t particularly religious, but they didn’t mind that I wandered into Sunday school, mostly because I enjoyed singing in the children’s choir. Behind the church, however, was something even more important to me: a surviving patch of woodland between the church and a row of strip malls along an arterial road. After Sunday school I often wandered into those woods before going home. For the first time I encountered a landscape that hadn’t been planned. Water ignored the straight lines I expected. Leaves accumulated instead of being raked away. Trees grew in no particular order. Red oaks, beeches, tulip poplars, and sweet birch stood among one another instead of in rows. I remember trying to redirect the water so it would flow in a way that made sense to me. It refused. Only much later did I realize that those woods were showing me what Bucks County had looked like before Levittown existed. The essay grew from recognizing that the “natural” landscape of my childhood was actually an enormous human creation, and that what felt mysterious to me as a child was simply the older landscape that had survived around its edges. Looking back, I think that little remnant of woodland was the first place I ever experienced something I would later call sacred.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/07 • Michael Okafor
09/14 • Kim Chinquee
09/21 • Avital Gad-Cykman
09/28 • Lydia Gwyn
10/05 • Girija Tropp
10/12 • Kathy Fish
10/19 • Katherine Garrison
10/26 • TBD
11/02 • TBD
11/09 • TBD
11/16 • TBD
11/23 • TBD
11/30 • TBD
12/07 • TBD
12/14 • TBD
12/21 • TBD
12/28 • TBD