"Black and White is cheaper"
the photographer girl says.
"Cheaper, not prettier.
Less and less real."
The girl writes in
pictures, talks foul
language and follows
the tow-headed
children around the
playground, eyes
crawling across the Jungle
Gym, thoughts hanging
on the tire-swing by the
green mud ditch.
The brain gets splinters
going up and down
the rough wooden slide
but it climbs and slides,
climbs and slides, all
for the joy
of slides,
but there are no smiles in
a landscape.
Every photograph is
a smell, an early morning
scent of a place,
pushing the old rock
of memory a few feet
further,
no matter how black
white and blurred false.
Your picture of you is newsprint too, white
wig as pale as clean cotton,
glasses as black as empty
space on your almost
cold, white face.
You could never be a girl without
memory, a girl with
out a headfull of
smells and hands
smart enough
to work the insect
eye camera lens,
and though I
get distracted by
the sound of
sunrise,
I carry smells of
my own, stuck
to things and girls,
oily ink exposed
on white
paper.
- Steven Byrd