Tag: photograph

Three Poems by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

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PHOTOGRAPH

It’s almost Giacomettish of you,
your rather persistent disinclination

toward the up-close photo
of us that I often ask for as we travel.

As though it held less truth
than untruth as we lean against a sycamore,

or sit across a white linen table
where the great invisible

distance that is alive and well between
any two people, no matter how much love,

has once again slipped past undetected
by the dull instrument of the camera.

That great invisible distance
that Giacometti wanted to show

when he positioned his models standing
a few feet from him as he worked

but strove to make viewers perceive them
as from a point farther away.

And that these dual perspectives
hold each other in perfect balance

like two children on a seesaw,
neither pair of feet

touching the dusty ground. It’s almost
Giacomettish of you,

when I ask a friendly tourist
to snap a picture of us,

a once in a lifetime shot to remember
the two of us overlooking

the giant maw of Vesuvius
that erupted those

many millennia ago,
and you once again, refuse.

*

On The Swimmer by Pablo Picasso

Orange figure in blue water,
arms flung out like wings,

female, in freefall, letting the water
hold you any way it wants.

The paint brushed thinly
as if it too were floating. And after

swimming, when you lie
on sun-warmed shale,

I imagine each drying water bead
as the remains of that second skin

that had held you, everywhere,
as only the water can,

loved even your miserable parts.
Stuck its wet tongue all over

into the very smallest spaces,
those most difficult

to open that you had allowed
yourself to forget.

*

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

after a painting by Rose Wylie

Before they razed the hedge, I did not see it.
What I saw—just the warm brown
of wood-slatted fence and reaching green

from the other side. I’m a painter. I was held
by those colors, did not even imagine
a domicile with other humans.

Each morning, the wrens, round as notes
in the dry brush from last autumn.
The house is yellow. It does not cheer me

with its single black window
like an eye gone dark.
But oh, how I love the brown

tall tree that leans towards the house next door.
And that I can paint away from the truth:
that this tree is rooted firmly

on my side of the fence and could not
crush that house were it to fall.

*

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches at the 92nd Street Y and is Associate Editor-at Large for Plume Poetry journal. Her poems have appeared the New York Times, Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, Plume, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, RATTLE, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third book, Echolocation, was published by Plume Editions/MadHat Press in March of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Award, a longlist finalist for the Julie Suk Award and Runner Up for the Poetry By the Sea Best Book Award.

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.

*

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.

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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Photograph

His back to the camera
my father stands at the ocean’s edge.
Hands in his pockets, the flannel lining
thin as the hospital-issue robe
his own father wore over his pajamas.
“Go out to the hallway,”
he was told, “if you’re going to cry.”
Today, a moth stirs the air
near the dogwood. Circling and reversing.
Searching for more than is there.
The unopened leaf buds like half-said things.
At what edge does my father now stand?

*

On Suffering

Studying my reflection in the blossoming plums
I stumbled and fell.
My mother, who could never forgive my beauty
leaned over the examination table.
“Now you know how it feels,” she said.
It meaning life, I supposed.
The nurse gave me a tender look, her face radiant
with the world’s pain. A shoulder blade
was eased back into place.
Gravel removed with a surgical blade.
I imagined myself as the rock before it was crushed
and made into pavement. This was consolation.
I sensed all my troubles dropping away.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/

A PHOTOGRAPH OF A BOY’S LESSON IN MANHOOD by John Grey

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A PHOTOGRAPH OF A BOY’S LESSON IN MANHOOD

That’s me behind the lawn mower.
My father is in the background,
shouting orders.
“Hold down the bar!
Pull the cord!”
The grass is not high
but that’s not the point
of this exercise.
Though my head
barely rises over the handle,
he figures I’m old enough
to start the machine
and push it up and down
the back yard.
It’s his job normally.
But, in this photograph,
he’s working at his other job –
making me into
a miniature version of himself.
We’ve done the fishing-rod ritual.
We’ve played catch so much
I feel like a retriever.
And I’ve hammered a nail.
I’ve wielded a screwdriver.
And now it’s time
to mow the lawn.
This picture shows neither
triumph nor failure.
It’s the moment before
both things are possible.
So what happened?
As far as I know,
I did.

*

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Rathalla Review. Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.

*HOOK HAIKU* by Paul Siegell

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*HOOK HAIKU*

Throw the baby in
the pool—Take the photograph.
Nevermind what’s next.

*

Paul Siegell is the author of Take Out Delivery (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), wild life rifle fire (Otoliths, 2010), jambandbootleg (A-Head, 2009) and Poemergency Room (Otoliths, 2008). Pennsylvania’s 2021 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, he has contributed to American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Rattle, Sixth Finch, and many other fine journals. Kindly find more of his work at ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL (http://paulsiegell.blogspot.com).