Tag: photo

The Field in Relief by Margaret Taylor-Ulizio

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The Field in Relief

I see my shadow stretching out long and thin
along the surface of the plowed ground,
and I wonder how I have grown fivefold

in the waning of the light.
I ask an old man on a tractor
if I can take his photo, and
he wonders where it will

end up. The photo lives on
without him now,
and the tractor sits in stillness.
I walk my dog and am startled
by a young coyote, curious on its path.
I catch his eye for a moment,

and he runs away. I tread among
the giants, their heads bowed
above me, growing tall in the
plowed ground. And the birds feast,
not on the eyes of hanging men,
but on the smiling faces

of the sunflowers, now turned in the evening
away from where shadows run big. The cleared
field shows a snake in monochrome
against the brown earth and the slanted
light, where my husband plots the ground for
the harvest he hopes will come, himself
a silhouette in granite, standing against the
sky of burning orange.

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Margaret Taylor-Ulizio is a poet from New Jersey. Margaret’s poems have appeared in the San Antonio Review, Amethyst Review, Orchards Poetry Journal, Merion West (forthcoming) as well as local anthologies.

TOO MANY PHOTOGRAPHS OF MY FATHER by Andrea Potos

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TOO MANY PHOTOGRAPHS OF MY FATHER

In frames, on poster boards, on tabletops
in the downstairs parlor of the funeral home
that humid evening in mid-August, low lighting
from wall sconces and brass lamps, loveseats
and chairs arranged to look like invitations,
so many people examining and exclaiming over all
that proof of my father’s long and irrepressible life;
I could only glance from a distance, I wanted only
to stand halfway between the overwrought mahogany
coffin my stepmother picked out, and the back of the room
where water was being served, surely it should have
been wine, my father merited the good wine I said to myself
standing there among the murmuring and respectful living,
holding on to my center the way I knew how
somewhere in the middle of the room.

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Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Marrow of Summer and Mothershell, both from Kelsay Books; and A Stone to Carry Home from Salmon Poetry. You can find her poems many places online and in print, most recently in Spirituality & Health Magazine, Braided Way, Buddhist Poetry Review, and Poetry East. She is actively working on a new collection of poems entitled Her Joy Becomes.