mobile architecture

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

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

Poems

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mobile architecture

Looking at Photos

The Photograph Suggests a Hidden Life

A blurry photograph

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