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Copyright © 2023 by José Felipe Alvergue. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 28, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
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Looking at Photos
translated from the Spanish by John Keene
Dagmaris walking away on the beach.
Asunción, her fan, her trim do.
Gloria two days before dying.
Roberto, pointing to nothing.
Idermis behind Oscar, after Jorge.
Jesús Cos Causse
2021
The Photograph Suggests a Hidden Life
Past Storrow Drive, over the Mystic
River Bridge, my father lived in Chelsea—
home to Katz’s two-step bagel, to perpetually
broken sidewalks. A minor chord
in an immigrant tale—feral curls,
thirdhand coat—my dad looks
into the me he cannot imagine.
His eyes and hips glitter as he stands
against the glass of the family’s corner shop.
After school, working wordlessly beside his father—
leased, not owned—he would repeat—
a livelihood soon-to-fail from unpaid credit
Susan Rich
2018
A blurry photograph
The tree azalea overwhelms the evening with its scent,
defining everything and the endless fields.
Walking away, suddenly, it slices off and is gone.
The visible object blurs open in front of you,
the outline of a branch folds back into itself, then clarifies—just as you turn away—
and the glass hardens into glass
as you go about taking care of things abstractedly
one thing shelved after another, as if they were already in the past,
needing nothing from you until, smashing itself on the tile floor,
Martha Ronk
2013