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Photograph

T.J. Butler

Photograph One
These people look like my parents,
strange how closely they resemble

when I know they cannot be
because my parents do not hold each other.
This man with my father’s hair is looking into the lens,
surprised there is someone there to shoot a picture.
The woman wearing my mother’s clothes is looking down,

picking my mother’s bare feet through rocks.

I can tell by their out of focus faces that they are impostors
like the ghosts who
leer from stark and screaming negatives
and wish to be color,
and wish to be real.


Photograph Two
The wind is blowing their hair above their heads.

The sun behind them shines it into golden halos against the trees.
He is staring into the lens,
surprised someone is there to shoot the picture.
His arm draped over her exposed shoulders
says they’re on their way to make me out of

pot smoke and cheap wine on

the blanket,

accidentally cropped off to fit the frame,
held a four-foot bong and a bass guitar.

Now she’s lifting wine to her lips, taking his
shotgun & seed.

They watch the sky spin into negative space
and wonder if they made

a baby, who minutes before,

had cried from heaven,

begged the stork not me, not me,

it can’t happen on the blanket.


But it happened on the blanket,
accidentally cropped off to fit the frame,
and bong, and bass guitar.

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