She says all the things they expect her to say.
The camera captured her fashionably off center,
bent back as if by a thousand invisible hands
pulling her to the wall to ravish her
into black-and-white brick.
No one asks what she was thinking;
they only want to know about her man, the plans
they’ve made for faraway places — they press
question after question into her space, starving
for details, for names and dates.
There is a spiral in the bokeh blur
where she moved her hand just a bit faster
than the shutter could react; in every photograph
she makes her body a splash of verticality
against the horizontal plane, but here it seems
she’s pushing up against the frame itself,
fingers flailing through the haze of grain.
And the man? He’s off to the side, a pastiche
of denial in the way he’s looking away;
he’s only there to balance her out as a half-blur
between her and the background, seconds away
from not being there at all. She must be alone
in a later shot; she might as well have been now.
She says all the things they expect her to say,
but after tonight she’ll never look at it again —
every photo ever taken is a photo of the dead,
an artifact of something that barely ever was
and might as well have never been.
October 2010